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THE   CHRISTIAN    VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 


THE  CHRISTIAN  VIEW 
OF  THE  WORLD 


Nathaniel  William   Taylor   Lectures 

FOR  1910-1911,  delivered  hefore 

THE  Divinity  School  of 

Yale  University 

By 

George  John  Blewett 

Ryerson  Professor  of  Moral  Philosophy  in 
Victoria  College,  Toronto 


New  Haven  :  Yale  University  Press 

London  :    Henry  Frowde 

Oxford  University  Press 

MCMXII 


Copyright,  1912 

BY 

Yale  University  Press 


Printed  from  type.    1250  copies. 
March,  1912. 


TO 

GEORGE  HERBERT  PALMER 

WITH  REVERENCE  AND  DEEP  AFFECTION 


PREFACE 


The  oecumenical  theology  is  old;  and  from  the 
beginning  was  inevitable.  The  greatest  of  the  Apostles 
could  not  be  blind  to  the  significance  of  the  new  life 
that  was  in  them;  in  their  Lord  they  read  the  eternal 
constitution  of  the  world.  And  when  Christianity 
became  the  world's  religion,  it  was  inevitable  that 
theology  should  become  a  secular  labour  of  mankind. 
Christian  experience,  maintaining  its  reality  as  the 
religion  of  a  Hellenised  world  to  which  reason  and 
the  demand  for  rational  insight  were  also  realities, 
could  not  do  other  than  set  itself  to  interpret  the 
Person  of  Christ;  and  in  the  interpretation  it  found, 
as  had  the  Apostles,  a  view  of  God  and  man.  It  is 
the  conviction  of  these  lectures  that  the  significance 
of  that  view,  so  far  from  being  exhausted  or  out- 
lived in  the  long  movement  of  human  history,  is  con- 
tinuously unfolding  itself;  both  for  the  science  of 
man,  seeking  the  intelligible  unity  of  the  strangely 
diverse  facts  of  our  life;  and  for  the  practice  of  man, 
seeking  to  bring  itself  deliberately,  and  from  its  own 
centres  of  affection  and  volition,  into  accord  with 
that  eternal  truth  and  unity  of  the  world. 

But  a  significance  continually  unfolding  means  that 
an  eternal  life  is  in  its  own  order  manifesting  itself ; 
primarily  in  religion,  secondarily  in  theology  the  intel- 
lectual reflex  of  religion.     And  if  that  be  true,  no 


viii  PREFACE 

secular  step  in  the  development  of  theology  can  be 
altogether  final.  The  Greek  has  made  himself  indeed, 
in  theology  as  in  other  things,  the  schoolmaster  of 
all  time.  Yet  the  ultimate  word  cannot  be  that  of  the 
Greek.  Behind  Greek  and  Roman,  behind  man  of 
thought  and  lawyer  and  priest,  behind  all  the  the- 
ologies, metaphysical  or  ethical,  political  or  legal — 
behind  the  Apostles  themselves — is  an  eternal  life; 
our  Lord,  with  His  own  consciousness  of  God,  His 
own  consciousness  of  the  world.  To  make  that  con- 
sciousness determinative  of  our  life  and  of  civilisation 
is  the  business  of  Christianity;  to  bring  Christianity 
to  the  intellectual  apprehension  of  its  own  signifi- 
cance is  the  task  of  theology.  It  is  a  task  fulfilled 
only  there,  where  all  human  efforts  after  knowledge 
and  all  human  beginnings  of  science  are  fulfilled ;  in 
the  absolute  intuition  in  which  every  fact  is  seen  in 
the  completeness  of  its  relations — every  fact  in  the 
completeness  of  its  relations,  and  God  as  all  in  all. 
Such  intuition  is  not  the  form  of  our  understanding; 
but  it  is  at  once  the  real  basis  and  the  moving  ideal 
of  all  our  understanding;  and  toward  it  we  must 
work  as  we  can. 

A  significance  continually  unfolding  means,  how- 
ever, a  further  thing.  Such  a  progressive  manifesta- 
tion of  an  eternal  life  means  also  a  principle  of  per- 
petual life  in  those  to  whom  and  in  whom  the  mani- 
festation is  made.  Hence  it  is  that  the  task  of  theology 
cannot  be  confined  to  scholars,  or  to  men  of  thought, 
or  to  races  whose  genius  is  thought.    Directly  or  indi- 


PREFACE  ix 

rectly  all  men  who  have  in  them  any  breath  of  life  are 
at  work  upon  it;  directly  or  indirectly  every  human 
affection  and  action  touches  it ;  and  light  at  any  point 
is  light  for  theology.  They  contribute  most  to  the 
development  of  theology  who  most  have  given  their 
hearts  to  the  enrichment  of  the  perpetual  and  infinite 
movement  of  the  spirit  of  man;  and  whose  minds  are 
by  that  devotion  made  open  to  all  dawning  of  light 
that  has  been  or  now  is  upon  the  earth. 

Theology,  once  more,  is  old;  older  far  than  Chris- 
tianity; and  bears  onward  a  most  manifold  ethnic 
inheritance.  But  to  make  theology  Christian;  and  to 
se2  Christianity  in  its  essential  greatness — capable  on 
the  one  hand  of  taking  into  itself  all  that  seems  most 
revolutionary  in  the  penetrating  insight  of  modern 
science  into  the  continuity  of  man's  life  with  all  the  life 
of  the  earth — capable  on  the  other  hand  of  giving  to 
our  unsettled  and  fatefully  changing  civilisation  that 
guidance  and  deep  impulse  of  social  ideals  which  it 
needs;  such  is  the  never-finished  task  that  confronts 
the  theologian.  It  is  only  in  a  narrow  sense  that  such 
a  work  is  the  work  of  individuals ;  it  is  rather  a  work 
of  collective  mankind,  and  of  the  spiritual  principle 
which  is  seeking  to  realise  itself  in  that  life  of  mankind 
in  which  action  is  with  contemplation,  and  love  is  with 
thought,  continually  involved. 

To  Professor  Curtis,  Acting  Dean  of  the  Divinity 
School,  and  to  other  members  of  the  Divinity  School 
and  of  the  University,  I  am  indebted  for  generous  and 


X  PREFACE 

thoughtful  kindness.  It  was  a  happiness  to  be  allowed 
to  discharge  at  Yale  an  office  of  piety  and  of  remem- 
brance; the  happiness  was  doubled  by  all  that  consid- 
erate hospitality. 

Victoria  College  in  the  University  of  Toronto. 
January^  1912. 


CONTENTS 


I 

The   Christian   Consciousness   and  the   Task  of 
Theology 

Religion  as  the  practical  unity  of  life  .  .  .  1-4 
The  task  of  the  theologian  is,  (1)  to  bring  to 
clear  consciousness  the  view  of  the  world 
implicit  in  religion,  (2)  to  relate  that  view 
to  our  rational  consciousness  of  the  world  4—6 
The  view  of  the  world  implicit  in  the  Chris- 
tian consciousness 6-43 

Introductory :  the  Christian  consciousness  must 

be  seen  in  its  history [6-9] 

The  Christian  consciousness  is  primarily  a  con- 
sciousness of  salvation,  ultimately  a  com- 
munion with  God  in  thought  and  affection 

and  will [9-10] 

The  chief  positions  of  the  view  of  the  world 
involved  in  such  a  consciousness  are : 
(1)  Reality  is  a  spiritual  society;  a  society 
of  persons,  God  and  His  children.  The 
relations  of  our  life  are  personal  rela- 
tions; and  our  life  is  religious  when  it 
is  determined  by  a  consciousness  of  God 
and  of  our  relation  to  Him,  and  thus 
becomes  communion  with  God   .       .       .       [11-14] 

In  that  communion  of  the  Christian 
man  with  God,  God  is  apprehended  as 
the  absolute  principle  of  the  world  .       .       [14-17] 

This  is  confirmed  rather  than  contra- 
dicted, by  the  nature  of  the  Christian 
life  as  a  life  of  faith [17-20] 


xii  CONTENTS 

(2)  But  within  that  monism  of  the  Chris- 
tian mind,  a  dualism  is  included;  in- 
cluded, however,  as  subordinate  to  the 
monism,  and  as  overcome;  though  in 
certain  stages  of  Christian  experience 
(which  have  received  frequent  and  im- 
portant expression  in  theology  and  philos- 
ophy)   the   dualism   seems  irreconcilable 

and  hopeless [20-37] 

(3)  The  reconciliation  is  specifically  effected 
in  the  ideas  of  the  Incarnation  and  of 
Redemption;  and  this  both  in  Christian 
experience,  and  in  the  greatest  of  the 
theological  formulations  of  Christian  ex- 
perience         [37-42] 

The  second  task  of  the  theologian :  to  relate 
that  religious  view  of  the  world  to  our 
rational  consciousness  of  the  world     .      ,       42-61 

The  nature  of  theology  as  the  interpenetration 

of  reason  and  religion [43^8] 

The  difficulties  of  such  theology  ....  [48-55] 

The  topics  of  the  remaining  lectures  .       .       .  [55-61] 

Conclusion 61-69 

II 

Human  Experience  and  the  Absolute  Spirit 

Introductory 70-74 

The  form  of  our  experience  that  of  develop- 
ment     .      .      .      .' 74-77 

What  is  involved  in  development;  a  priority 

of  actuality  to  potentiality 78-79 

The  actuality  implied  as  prius  in  the  develop- 
ment which  is  our  experience :  the  Absolute 
Spirit 80-88 


CONTENTS  xiii 

To  ask  whether  there  may  not  be  some  other 
absolute  than  the  absolute  implied  in  our 
experience  is  to  make  imaginary  difficulties       [83-88] 

What  is  the  relation  of  that  Spirit  to  our 

individuality?         88-89 

The  way  to  an  answer  lies  (for  reflective  rea- 
son) in  considering  more  fully  the  nature 
of  the  development  which  is  the  growth  of 
our  experience.  That  development  is  (1) 
of  the  implicit  to  the  explicit,  (2)  a  self- 
organising  process 89-109 

Such  being  the  nature  of  our  experience,  the 
relation  of  the  Absolute  Spirit  to  it  must 
be  one  of  self-communication.  Such  a 
view  makes  intelligible  to  us  the  possibility 
of  our  experience,  alike  as  the  common  life 
of  man  (pp.  109-131)  and  as  the  science, 
the  morality,  the  religion,  in  which  that 
common  life  fulfils  itself  (pp.  131-140)      .   109-144 

The  historical  development  of  this  view  .      .   144-149 

The  unity  of  religion  and  reason  in  this  view 
of  the  relation  of  our  life  to  an  Absolute 
Spirit,  who  seeks  in  us  a  fulfilment  of 
Himself 149-165 

III 

Nature 

The  view  of  nature  involved  in  religion     .      .   166-175 
The  scientific  view  of  the  continuity  of  man 
with   nature,    forces  the  religious  mind  all 
the  more  definitely  to  the  view  of  nature 
just  indicated [172-175] 


xiv  CONTENTS 

The  view  of  nature  taken  by  reflective  reason  175-192 

The  harmony  of  religion  and  reason  in  this  .   193-195 

Special  points : 

1.  Nature  not  necessarily  the  whole  of  God's 

way  of  communicating  Himself  to  man        .    [195-196] 

2.  Nature  as  greater  and  less  than  man        .    [196-198] 

•<       3.     Nature  "coming  to  consciousness  of  itself 

in  man" [198-204] 

The  full  significance  of  this  formula  does 
not  appear,  until  we  remember  that  nature, 
in  coming  to  consciousness  of  itself  in  man, 
comes  to  be  sin  in  man ;  and,  coming  to  be 
sin  in  man,  is  taken  up  into  man's  redemp- 
tion            [202-204] 

4.  Summary;  the  place  of  nature  in  our  life 
being  what  it  is,  we  must  say  that  the  reality 
of  nature  (or  some  organic  part  of  that 
reality)  is  the  reality  of  a  relation  between 

man  and  God [204-214] 

It  is  in  that  regard  that  the  immature  ideal- 
ism which  thinks  of  ideas  and  presentations 
rather  than  of  spirit,  most  signally  breaks 
down [209-214] 

5.  On  this  view  religion  is  freed  from  the 
burden  of  a  radical  antagonism  to  nature; 
and  theology  from  the  burden  of  antago- 
nism to  natural  science [214-219] 

6.  The  significance  of  the  principle  of  the  uni- 
formity of  nature.  The  bearing  of  that 
principle  upon  the  question  (1)  of  the  possi- 
bility of  miracle,  (2)  of  the  effectiveness  of 

prayer    [219-252] 

Conclusion 252-253 


CONTENTS  XV 

IV 
Freedom,   Sin  and  Redemption 

The  view  so  far  "holds  together  and  holds  the 

facts  together" 254-257 

But  does  it  not  break  down  before  the  problem 

of  evil? 257-258 

That  problem  has  a  practical  solution,  a  solu- 
tion for  action  and  affection,  in  the 
experience  of  Christian  men;  it  cannot, 
therefore,  consistently  be  declared  by  the 
theologian  either  to  be  intrinsically  insolu- 
ble, or  to  be  irrelevant  to  theology  .      .      .   258-263 

Ideas  which  constitute  at  least  the  beginning 
and  promise  of  a  solution  have  long  been, 
both  practically  and  reflectively,  a  posses- 
sion of  the  Christian  mind 263-266 

These  stated  in  outline 266-308 

Introduction :  As  we  have  seen,  creation  is  not 
external  or  indifferent  to  God;  He  seeks  a 
fulfilment  of  Himself  in  it [266-268] 

A.  Such  fulfilment  of  God  in  creation, 
through  communion  between  Him  and  His 
created  spirits,  involves  a  freedom  of  those 

spirits [268-272] 

B.  But  in  the  case  of  us  men,  both  as  indi- 
viduals and  as  a  race,  before  we  have 
entered  into  our  freedom  we  are  already 
involved  in  sin [273-295] 

C.  But  the  fact  that  the  process  of  the  world 
is  one  which  involves  man  in  sin  is  not  the 
whole  of  the  fact ;  that  whole  of  the  fact  is 
that  the  process  of  the  world  is  a  process  of 


xvi  CONTENTS 

redemption.  So  that  we  apprehend  God's 
creative  work  as  it  really  is,  only  when  we 
apprehend  it  as  creation  in  and  through  a 

redemptive  process [295-305] 

Summary [305-308] 

The  inner  reality  of  history  being  a  process  of 
redemption,  we  must  now  turn  to  the  de- 
tailed study  of  the  history  which  is  thus 
the  concrete  course  of  redemption;  must 
return,  that  is,  to  the  historical  disciplines 
of  theology  from  which  we  began  .      .      .   308-343 

Redemption  is  the  hidden  wisdom  of  all  nature 
and  all  history;  but  the  central  place  and 
the  central  power  are  Christ's;  He  ex- 
presses and  achieves  the  meaning  of  his- 
tory, and  in  Him  nature  comes  to  the  true 
consciousness  of  itself [308-313] 

The  relation  of  philosophy  and  history  in  the- 
ology         [313-318] 

Special  remarks  concerning: 

The  oecumenical  Christology     ....    [318-338] 

The  width  of  the  redemptive  process   .       .    [338-342] 

Conclusion 343 


THE  CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 


I 


The  Christian   Consciousness  and  the  Task  of 
Theology 

To-day  I  have  to  speak  of  religion  in  its  highest 
form  as  the  Christian  consciousness;  and  of  theology, 
as  the  perpetual  vocation  laid  by  the  existence  of  that 
consciousness  upon  the  reason  of  man. 

Religion,  as  the  Christian  consciousness,  is  that  in 
which  the  whole  being  of  a  man — in  all  his  feeling 
and  passion,  all  his  intelligence  and  will — becomes  one 
faith,  one  hope,  one  love.  It  is  the  life  in  which  all 
the  impulses  and  interests  that  set  our  nature  upon 
work,  have  gathered  themselves  into  the  love  of  God, 
so  that  by  the  love  of  God  the  life  of  man  is  informed 
and  inspired  and  raised  continually  to  higher  energies. 
In  the  love  of  God,  the  interests  and  impulses  of  our 
human  nature  do  not  lose  themselves,  nor  lay  aside 
their  concrete  and  particular  character,  nor  turn  aside 
from  their  own  special  objects.  Rather  they  enter 
upon  their  own  deeper  being  as  forms  of  man's  highest 
devotion;  with  its  ultimate  sanctity  they  are  all  made 
sacred.  Philosophy  and  science,  art  and  morality,  as 
they  are  "in  themselves,"  are  abstractions ;  expressions 
and  activities  of  a  spiritual  nature,  which  in  them  is 
labouring  to  fulfil  itself,  but  whose  demand  for  fulfil- 
ment  is   met   only   when   science   and   art,    reflective 


2        CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

thought  and  dutiful  conduct,  have  all  become  the  con- 
crete filling  and  expression  of  the  love  of  God.  Until 
that  has  come  to  be  in  a  man's  life,  his  art  and  science 
and  morality,  his  toil  of  hands  and  toil  of  mind,  are 
not  to  him  what  they  can  be.  It  is  only  as  they  become 
the  concrete  elements  and  factors  of  the  religious  life, 
and  the  true  forms  of  its  devotion — only  as  they  are 
oflfered  to  God  as  the  works  in  which  we  serve  Him, 
and  in  which  He  fulfils  Himself  in  us — that  they  either 
truly  fulfil  themselves,  or  that  human  nature  truly  is 
fulfilled  in  them.  As  a  highest  and  most  concrete  prin- 
ciple includes  all  those  special  principles,  all  those  many 
and  diverse  centres  of  life,  in  which  it  manifests  and 
fulfils  itself,  so  with  religion.  Not  in  any  abstract 
sense  but  in  the  most  concrete  sense  possible,  it  is  the 
whole  of  experience  with  everything  in  it  raised  to  a 
new  order  of  dimensions  in  height  and  intensity,  and 
nothing  lost;  the  whole  of  experience  with  all  its  par- 
ticular interests  and  affections,  labours  and  loyalties, 
determined  by  a  consciousness  at  once  emotional  and 
intellectual  of  its  own  universal  and  eternal  relations; 
the  whole  of  life,  that  is  to  say,  animated  from  within 
by  the  love  of  God,  and  by  that  inner  inspiration  ren- 
dered truly  a  unity  through  all  the  aspects  and  exer- 
cises of  our  many-sided  nature.  Hence  it  is  that  in 
religion  the  deep  opposites  of  our  nature  find  their 
harmony.  That  tragic  division  of  our  nature,  the 
moral  division  of  man  against  himself,  is  overcome, 
and  in  the  love  of  God  we  enter  upon  a  life  which  is 
at  once  most  contemplative  and  most  practical,  most 


THE  TASK  OF  THEOLOGY  3 

inward  and  most  objective,  most  individual  and  most 
universal;  most  solitary,  and  yet  in  the  Kingdom  of 
God  most  united  to  all  that  is;  most  comprehensive 
of  an  infinitely  varied  content,  yet  most  brought  to 
simplicity  and  purity  by  the  recognition  that  "one 
thing  is  needful";  most  given  to  quietness,  yet  most 
devoted  to  all  manner  of  mighty  works — works  in 
which  nature  is  subdued,  and  the  earth  made  fair,  and 
the  mind  of  man  developed,  and  the  order  of  his 
society  made  an  order  of  clean  and  righteous  life. 

But  in  religion  man  thus  overcomes  the  divisions  of 
his  nature  and  is  made  one  with  himself,  only  because 
all  the  passions,  all  the  energies,  all  the  loyalties  of  his 
nature  have  gone  beyond  himself  and  are  fastened 
upon  God.  Religion,  as  it  is  in  the  Christian  con- 
sciousness, is  the  true  and  concrete  unity  of  our  expe- 
rience, precisely  because  it  means  our  experience  com- 
ing into  unity  with  the  absolute  principle  of  the  world. 
To  the  great  world  in  which  we  have  our  daily  being, 
our  natures  are  bound  by  clinging  and  untwineable 
tendrils ;  the  religion  which  should  make  us  at  one  with 
a  god  who  is  not  the  god  of  the  world,  would  but 
deepen  the  divisions  of  our  life  and  intensify  into  hope- 
lessness all  our  spiritual  warfare.  But  the  Christian 
consciousness,  so  far  as  it  is  able  to  do  justice  to  its 
own  idea  and  is  not  driven  into  one-sidedness  by  the 
very  intensity  of  its  inevitable  strife,  has  no  doubt  at 
all  that  its  communion  is  with  the  supreme  and  crea- 
tive principle  of  the  objective  order  of  the  world. 
When  we  speak  of  religion  as  that  in  which  we  come 


4        CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

to  unity  within  ourselves,  and  when  we  speak  of  it  as 
that  in  which  we  come  to  unity  with  the  absolute 
principle  of  the  world,  we  speak  of  aspects  correlative 
and  inseparable.  It  is  only  in  an  all-mastering  and 
all-inclusive  devotion  to  the  eternal  principle  of  what 
we  unthoughtfully  call  the  "world  without,"  that  there 
is  achieved  the  unity  of  the  individual  man's  "world 
within" ;  the  world  of  his  thoughts  and  passions,  hopes 
and  fears,  desires  and  ideals,  struggles  and  achieve- 
ments. And  this  unity  in  which,  at  one  and  the 
same  time  and  by  one  and  the  same  spiritual  pro- 
cess— the  process  of  a  great  aflfection — the  appalling 
division  of  the  human  soul  between  good  and  evil  is 
overcome,  and  the  man  becomes  one  within  himself, 
one  with  nature,  one  with  God : — this  unity  is  realised 
in  the  conduct  of  the  practical  life,  only  gradually,  in 
and  through  the  long  struggle  of  the  new  birth  and 
regeneration  of  man ;  but  in  faith  and  in  the  love  which 
is  the  other  side  of  faith,  it  is  realised  instantaneously, 
eternally,  timelessly — with  a  completeness  as  of 
achievement  once  and  for  all,  a  completeness  as  of 
eternal  presence,  the  barriers  being  swept  at  one  stroke 
away — so  that  Christian  men  are  said  to  be  "justified 
by  faith." 

But  any  practical  attitude  on  the  part  of  man  has 
implicit  in  it  a  view  or  assumption  about  the  nature  of 
things ;  about  the  nature  of  the  world  and  the  signifi- 
cance of  our  life  in  it.  And  this  is  pre-eminently  the 
case  when  the  practical  attitude  in  question  is  religion, 


THE  TASK  OF  THEOLOGY  5 

such  a  gathering  and  concentration  of  the  whole  of 
Hfe,  through  love  and  faith,  into  a  unity  of  character 
and  action,  of  impulse  and  affection.  Our  religion  is, 
in  fact,  our  real  and  total  view  of  the  world,  put  into 
action.  This  does  not  mean  that  first  the  intellect — 
"sounding  on,  a  dim  and  perilous  way" — achieves  a 
view  of  the  world,  and  then  this  view  arouses  the 
heart,  and  thus  calls  high  and  practical  passions  into 
the  field.  On  the  contrary,  religion  is  at  once  intellect 
and  emotion  and  will,  fused  into  an  indivisible  and 
most  masterful  reality  of  practice.  It  is  a  view  of  the 
world  which,  with  or  without  reflective  thought,  has  its 
being  in  faith  and  in  passion,  in  self-devotion  and 
practical  achievement.  And  Doctrinal  Theology,  how- 
ever it  proximately  apprehend  its  task,  and  whatever 
professional  order  of  loci  communes  it  receive  as  its 
way  of  taking  up  that  task,  yet  has  essentially  two 
things  to  do.  First,  it  has  to  bring  to  clear  conscious- 
ness— to  such  measure  of  clear  consciousness  as  the 
case  admits — the  view  of  the  world  thus  implicit  in 
Christianity ;  the  outlook  upon  life,  the  apprehension 
of  the  reality  of  things,  which  has  built  itself  up  as  a 
practical  power  in  the  men  and  the  races  that  have 
stood  in  the  discipleship  of  Christ  and  in  that  disciple- 
ship  have  laboured  to  build  up  on  the  earth  the  King- 
dom of  God.  Secondly,  it  has  to  consider  the  relation 
between  this  religious  apprehension  and  judgment  of 
the  world  of  our  life,  and  our  rational  apprehension 
of  that  world.  To  put  it  in  a  word,  the  theologian  is 
the  religious  man  making  his  reason  the  prophet  of  his 


6        CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

religion :  he  seeks  first  to  bring  his  rehgion  to  rational 
consciousness  of  itself ;  he  seeks  secondly  to  relate  the 
religion  which  thus  has  entered  into  intellectual  pos- 
session of  itself,  to  his  whole  rational  consciousness 
of  the  world. 

Turning  to  the  first  of  those  two  steps,  the  way  in 
which  it  has  just  been  stated  will  have  conveyed  the 
fact  that  while  it  is  a  study  of  our  own  consciousness, 
of  our  own  experience  as  Christian  men,  in  the  effort 
to  bring  to  clear  apprehension  the  view  of  the  world 
implicit  therein,  it  is  also  an  historical  study.  When 
it  is  said  that  the  theologian  is  the  religious  man  mak- 
ing reason  the  prophet  and  interpreter  of  his  religion, 
"his  religion"  does  not  mean  something  merely  indi- 
vidualistic. No  man's  life  can  be  merely  individual. 
By  blood  and  speech ;  by  usage  and  tradition  and  insti- 
tution; by  the  continuity  of  interest  from  age  to  age 
in  the  great  human  causes ;  by  the  hopes  and  fears 
and  beliefs  that  from  generation  to  generation  are  the 
true  schoolmasters  and  fashioners  of  the  soul  of 
man; — by  these,  and  by  all  that  these  mean,  the  indi- 
vidual life  is  woven  into  the  whole  of  history  and  the 
whole  of  history  into  the  individual  life.  And  pre- 
eminently is  this  true  of  religion,  as  the  unifying  and 
concentration  of  all  our  experience  in  a  highest  and  all- 
inclusive  affection.  Whether  we  view  the  Christian 
consciousness  in  its  profound  conviction  of  eternal  and 
objective  relations;  or  in  that  intensity  of  subjective 
feeling  which  is  the  correlate  of  such  conviction ;  or  in 
its  sense  of  the  unity  of  the  race  in  sin  and  in  salva- 


THE  TASK  OF  THEOLOGY  7 

tion,  and  its  devotion  to  the  long  struggle  for  the  race's 
welfare; — however  we  view  it,  it  is  a  consciousness 
historically  conditioned.  The  theologian,  beginning  at 
the  task  now  in  question  as  he  must  begin — namely, 
with  religious  experience  as  a  present  concrete  fact — 
has  to  deal  at  one  and  the  same  time  with  a  conscious- 
ness that  now  is  in  himself  and  in  his  society,  and  with 
a  history  in  which  the  present  content  and  colouring 
of  that  consciousness,  its  body  of  beliefs  and  its  tone 
of  emotion,  have  slowly  gathered  shape.  In  that  his- 
tory lawgivers  and  heroes,  prophets  and  priests, 
teachers  and  founders,  have  played  their  part ;  and  a 
literature  has  arisen  which  has  defeated  time,  not  only 
in  the  sense  of  enabling  us  intellectually  and  imagina- 
tively to  reconstruct  the  past,  but  in  the  deeper  sense 
of  mediating  the  religion  of  the  past  to  us  to  be  our 
religion.  In  both  the  history  and  the  literature,  the 
dominating  and  determinative  fact  is  the  apprehension 
and  acceptance  of  Jesus,  the  founder  of  Christianity, 
as  the  \6yos  of  God;  a  revelation  of  God  in  a  form 
of  such  catholic  human  simplicity  that  the  receiving 
of  it,  so  far  from  being  a  sophistication  of  our  nature, 
becomes  its  elementary  energy,  its  way  to  the  true  ful- 
filment of  itself  and  of  the  purpose  of  God.  Thus  it 
is  that  the  Christian  consciousness  has  come  to  be.  In 
certain  of  its  elements,  that  consciousness  arises  in  us 
directly  and  simply  as  the  reproduction  in  us  of  the 
mind  of  Jesus.  That  is  true,  for  instance,  of  the 
Christian  apprehension  of  God  as  our  Father;  it  is 
true  of  all  those  deep  and  simple  pieties  in  which  nature 


8        CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

and  its  creatures  are  apprehended  as  in  God's  imme- 
diate care.  But  other  elements  of  the  Christian  con- 
sciousness arise,  or  are  intensified,  in  the  contrast 
between  the  mind  of  Jesus  and  our  own.  The  sense 
of  sin  already  had  bowed  men  before  the  word  of  the 
prophet,  already  had  driven  men  to  the  altars  of  the 
priest ;  but  as  men  have  stood,  generation  after  genera- 
tion, in  the  presence  of  their  sinless  Lord,  and  in  the 
presence  of  the  Father  whom  He  reveals,  the  sense  of 
sin  has  become  a  heart-shaking  and  revolutionary 
power.  And  in  the  long  process  which  lies  between 
the  Founder  and  ourselves  the  Son  of  Man  has  made 
His  appeal  to  the  whole  of  human  nature;  to  reason, 
as  to  aflfection  and  will ;  with  the  result  that  in  the 
church  there  has  taken  place  the  greatest  and  most 
continuous  of  all  the  intellectual  histories  to  which  the 
searching  and  speculative  mind  of  man  has  given  it- 
self. So  that  the  consciousness  with  which  the  theo- 
logian has  to  deal  is  a  consciousness  not  merely  indi- 
vidual, but  also  secular — one  that  has  moved  through 
the  ages  and  has  built  up  enduring  institutions,  en- 
during records,  enduring  interpretations  of  itself,  and 
is  in  each  Christian  man  of  to-day  as  a  universal  in  its 
particulars ;  a  consciousness,  therefore,  for  our  ac- 
quaintance with  which  we  need  all  the  historical  disci- 
plines of  theology.  Christian  theologians  have  to  turn 
to  immediacies  of  experience  in  themselves  and  in  their 
society,  and  to  the  original  Christian  sources,  as  though 
there  had  been  no  intervening  history ;  and  at  the  same 
time  they  have  to  stand  in  their  places  in  the  succession 


THE  TASK  OF  THEOLOGY  9 

of  a  long  history,  they  have  to  pass  onward  an  increas- 
ing light,  they  have  to  make  an  ancient  faith  to  the 
men  of  their  own  day  living  and  vivid.  What  has  to 
take  place  in  them,  and  in  all  the  Christianity  of  their 
generation,  is  another  step  in  the  many-centuried  pro- 
cess which  at  once  separates  them  from,  and  connects 
them  with,  their  Lord;  the  process  of  the  widening 
power  of  His  mind  upon  the  consciousness  and  the 
civilisation  of  man;  the  process  in  which  His  con- 
sciousness made  itself  the  determinative  factor  of  our 
religious  experience.  As  I  attempt,  then,  to  indicate 
the  chief  positions — the  ground-lines — of  the  view  of 
the  world  contained  implicitly  in  the  practical  con- 
sciousness of  Christian  men,  I  must  ask  you  to  remem- 
ber that  that  practical  consciousness  connotes  the 
greatest  of  all  human  histories  and  the  profoundest 
and  most  inclusive  of  all  human  experiences.  Remem- 
bering that,  you  will  understand  that  the  utmost  I 
could  in  any  case  bring  would  be  outline  and  sugges- 
tion; doubly  so,  in  these  brief  lectures. 

The  Christian  consciousness  is  primarily  a  con- 
sciousness of  salvation ;  a  salvation  of  individuals, 
and  therefore  of  society ;  of  society,  and  therefore  of 
individuals.  Such  a  consciousness  of  salvation  means 
at  least  three  things.  First,  there  is  the  conscious- 
ness of  sin;  a  consciousness  intensely  personal,  and 
yet  not  merely  individualistic ;  for  in  knowing  our- 
selves we  know  a  world  which  stands  in  sin — in  the 
sin  of  the  world  our  sin  had  its  preparation  and  its 
root,  and  in  our  sin  that  terrible  history  goes  onward 


10      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

and  is  widened;  goes  onward  and  is  widened,  not 
only  in  the  sinful  deeds  of  individual  men,  but  also 
in  a  social  order  in  which  against  most  men  the  ways 
of  the  humaner  life  of  man  are  closed.  Secondly, 
there  is  the  consciousness  of  a  power  in  the  world 
able  to  save  us  from  our  sin,  and  able,  in  its  own  long 
order,  to  make  our  world  a  new  world.  Thirdly,  there 
is  the  consciousness  of  the  drawing  near  of  that  power 
to  us,  and  of  its  search  after  us,  so  that  it  may  find  us 
and  save  us.  Our  sin ;  the  saving  grace  of  God ;  the 
manifestation  of  that  saving  grace  to  us,  and  in  the 
history  of  our  race  upon  the  earth;  these,  not  succes- 
sive in  time  but  all  going  on  together,  are  the  primary 
apprehensions  of  the  Christian  soul.  And  the  fulfil- 
ment of  these  is  the  ultimate  form  of  the  Christian 
consciousness;  our  life  in  the  love  of  God,  the  com- 
munion of  man  with  God  in  thought  and  affection 
and  will;  a  communion  in  the  still  and  deep  con- 
templation, the  loss  of  which  by  modern  men  is  the 
loss  of  a  whole  order  of  civilising  powers ;  a  com- 
munion still  more  in  the  great  energies  in  which  love 
and  contemplation  alike  are  fulfilled  and  there  arises 
the  structure  of  the  Kingdom  of  God  wherein  salva- 
tion is  positive  rather  than  negative,  and  social  as  well 
as  individual — the  structure,  seen  and  unseen,  of  new 
heavens  and  a  new  earth. 

In  attempting  to  indicate  the  view  of  reality  implied 
and  involved  in  such  a  consciousness  of  salvation  and 
in  such  communion,  I  will  set  down  what  I  have 
to  say  under  three  heads.     For  convenience  of  refer- 


THE  TASK  OF  THEOLOGY  11 

ence  let  me  note  them  here ;  though  to  do  so  briefly,  I 
shall  have  to  use  one  or  two  technical  names,  taking 
these  in  their  literal  meaning,  not  in  their  historical 
associations.  First,  there  is  the  spiritual  monism  in- 
volved in  the  very  nature  of  Christian  love  and  faith. 
Secondly,  there  is  the  fact  that  in  that  monism  a  pro- 
found and  appalling  dualism  is  taken  up  and,  by  the 
power  of  faith  and  love,  overcome.  Thirdly,  there 
is  the  specific  way  in  which  the  reconciliation  of  the 
two  sides  is  effected;  in  the  great  ideas  of  the  Incar- 
nation and  of  Redemption.  And  of  course  it  is  under- 
stood that,  in  all  these,  I  am  to  have  in  mind  the 
developed  Christian  consciousness;  not  only  its  first 
movements  of  repentance,  but  its  deep  consummation 
as  the  experience  of  men  whose  hearts  are  confirmed 
in  the  love  of  God,  and  who  know  that  love  as  the 
reality  of  all  the  realities  of  life. 

In  that  apprehension  of  the  world  and  of  its  order 
which  is  involved  in  such  a  consciousness  and  such 
experience,  the  first  point  is,  then,  that  reality  is  taken 
to  be  a  society  of  spiritual  beings,  and  the  laws  of  real- 
ity to  be  laws  which  express  the  relationships  of  those 
spiritual  beings  to  one  another  in  their  activities  of 
goodness  and  of  sin;  relationships  not  external  nor 
merely  juridical,  but  the  most  inward,  the  most  inti- 
mate, and  therefore  the  most  profound  that  can  exist. 
Whether  he  reflects  upon  it  or  no,  the  Christian  man 
organises  his  life  as  though  the  universe  were  in  its 
actual,  its  present,  its  eternal  reality,  such  a  society 
of  persons;  God  and  the  children  of  God.     The  love 


13      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

of  the  Christian  man  to  God  is  (to  use  a  much-abused 
word  in  its  deep,  and  not  simply  in  its  legal  and  con- 
ventional, meaning)  the  love  of  a  person  for  a 
person^ — of  a  spirit  for  a  spirit ;  it  is  a  love  which 

1  By  personality  one  properly  means  that  which  is  suggested,  but  not 
fulfilled,  in  our  developing  human  experience  upon  the  earth;  a  prin- 
ciple which,  in  possessing  itself  and  possessing  a  world,  is  self-distin- 
guishing, self-objectifying,  self-determining;  a  principle  wherein  many 
distinguishable  elements  of  experience,  many  different  facts  and  actions 
and  kinds  of  facts  and  actions,  are  present  in  a  unity  not  merely  of 
consciousness  but  of  self-consciousness. 

In  this  lecture  we  are  concerned  with  matter  of  fact;  with  the  way  in 
which  the  Christian  consciousness  actually  does  apprehend  the  objective 
relations  of  our  life;  and  specially  with  the  way  in  which  it  takes  the 
greatest  of  those  relations — that  in  which  all  the  others  are  contained 
and  have  their  significance — as  being  in  the  sense  just  indicated  a  per- 
sonal one.  In  what  way  we  should  use  the  idea  of  personality  (as  an 
idea  suggested  by  our  own  experience),  in  the  attempt  at  a  rational  or 
scientific  apprehension  of  the  nature  of  the  supreme  principle  of  the 
world,  is  a  matter  for  the  next  lecture,  not  for  this.  But  I  will  set 
down    here    two    points    which    are    to    be    more    fully    discussed    there. 

(1)  We  enter  only  gradually  into  possession  of  our  world  and  of  our- 
selves; and  that  on  all  sides  of  our  being,  whether  in  perception  or  in 
discursive  reasoning,  whether  in  feeling  and  emotion  or  in  the  discipline 
of  these,  which  is  will.  But  God  must  possess  Himself  and  the  world 
in  a  single  intuition;  an  intuition  absolute,  eternal  (as  including  in  one 
complete     grasp     all     the     concrete     content     of     time)     and     creative. 

(2)  Human  personality  (at  any  rate  in  ordinary  experience)  is  an  ex- 
clusive principle  in  this  sense,  that  one  human  person  does  not  include 
others,  is  not  to  others  the  creative  and  sustaining  principle  of  their 
life ;  in  one  person  others,  with  their  individuality  not  broken  down,  do 
not  live  and  move  and  have  their  being.  But  if  it  were  solely  and 
strictly  in  that  sense  that  we  applied  the  term  personality  to  God — if, 
in  other  words,  we  viewed  God  as  in  His  essential  nature  incapable  of 
being  a  home  of  persons — then  for  one  thing  we  could  no  longer  ac- 
count for  the  existence  of  ourselves  and  our  experience;  and  for  an- 
other thing  we  should  have  to  rule  out  as  heretical  the  greatest  chapters 
in  the  history  of  oecumenical  theology — the  whole  Trinitarian  formu- 
lation for  instance.  Above  all,  we  should  have  to  rule  out  as  heretical 
Saint  Paul  with  his  insight  that  in  God  we  live  and  move  and  have  our 
being;  Saint  Paul — and  innumerable  others,  the  gravest  and  profoundest 
minds  in  the  development  of  the  thought  and  faith  of  the  church — to 
whom  God  was  a  spirit,  our  Father  and  the  Father  of  our  Lord  Jesus 
Christ,  but  not  such  an  exclusive  individuality  as  is  a  human,  or  a  legal, 
person.     And  what  would  be  left  to  us  would  be  a  sort  of  Deistic  indi- 


THE  TASK  OF  THEOLOGY  13 

meets  and  answers  to  a  love.  In  what  to  the  Christian 
man  is  the  world  of  his  own  soul — whether  that  in- 
cludes the  natural  and  physical  order  must  be  consid- 
ered later — it  is  the  will  of  God  and  the  will  of  man 
that  make  all  things  to  be  what  they  are ;  and  religion 
means  that  the  will  of  man,  not  in  any  mechanical  way 
but  in  the  energy  of  a  great  affection,  determines  itself 
by  reference  to  the  will  of  God.  For  the  Christian 
mind,  the  whole  duty  of  man  means  that  dutifulness 
of  love  which  men,  united  to  one  another  in  a  single 
social  order,  owe  to  their  Father  and  to  His  purposes, 
as  these,  through  individual  hearts,  make  themselves 
felt  in  all  the  great  ways  of  the  Kingdom  of  God — in 
the  institutions  of  society,  in  the  gathering  forces  of 
history,  in  all  amelioration  of  the  life  of  the  earth. 

vidualism,  in  which  a  hard  and  effective  morality  could  indeed  survive, 
but  religion  fades  away. 

Let  me  add  another  remark  to  indicate  how  injurious  it  is  in  such  a 
matter  as  this  to  employ,  as  criteria  of  truth  and  falsehood,  words  taken 
by  themselves  without  reference  to  the  experiences  and  the  histories  in 
which  men  learned  to  use  them.  The  great  technical  terms  of  the 
oecumenical  theology  itself,  when  taken  by  themselves  and  without  refer- 
ence to  the  most  remarkable  history  which  led  to  their  being  taken  over 
from  Greek  metaphysic  into  the  Christian  symbols,  do  not  carry  a  single 
unequivocal  and  intelligible  meaning.  For  instance,  the  use  of  terms  in 
the  Trinitarian  formula  as  on  the  one  hand  denoting  unity,  on  the 
other  distinction  or  individuality  within  the  unity,  is  almost  reversed 
in  the  Christological  formula;  and  thus,  if  the  mere  terms  were  all  we 
had  to  go  on,  distinct  meaning  would  be  cancelled  out.  Or  again,  if  a 
man  took  certain  of  the  terms  {ovffla — in  the  West,  substantia — or, 
in  its  different  way,  vTr6(7Ta(ns)  and — throwing  away  all  vision  of 
the  actual  circumstances,  struggles,  necessities,  of  the  time — insisted  on 
developing  the  pure  logic  of  the  terms,  he  would  in  the  end  be  driven 
away  from  any  and  every  idea  of  personality  as  applied  to  God;  the 
outcome  would  be  either  pantheistic  or  mystical — not  theistic  and 
Christian.  To  make  theology  a  matter  of  technical  terms  and  of  the 
logic  of  technical  terms  is  to  enter  upon  a  path  whose  end  is  on  the 
one  hand  emptiness  of  vital  and  penetrating  insight,  on  the  other  the 
spirit  of  the  inquisitor. 


14      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

And  as  the  love  of  man  to  God  is  the  love  of  a  person 
for  a  person,  so,  too,  the  repentance  which  stands  at 
the  gateway  of  the  Christian  life — nay,  which  dwells 
with  the  Christian  man  all  his  life  long,  as  in  him 
the  spirit  of  a  sinful  race  continually  judges  itself 
before  God — is  a  sorrow  for  the  most  concrete  and 
personal  of  all  wrongs,  the  wrong  of  a  son  against 
his  Father,  and  against  the  people  of  his  Father's 
house. 

But  to  this  something  further  must  be  added,  which 
is  of  the  very  essence  of  the  matter ;  a  thing  to  be  seen 
first  and  last  and  all  the  time  in  any  attempt  to  appre- 
hend the  religious  consciousness  as  it  is  in  Christianity. 
In  all  that  personal  relationship,  in  all  that  faith  and 
love,  all  that  repentance  and  hope,  the  communion  and 
unity  are  with  a  principle  taken  to  be  absolute.  The 
religious  man,  in  the  passion  and  the  achievement 
which  are  his  concrete  and  daily  life,  apprehends  him- 
self as  in  essential  relation  with  a  principle  which  is 
absolute  in  the  sense  that  it  is  the  source  of  life  to  all 
things  that  live;  apprehends  himself  as  bound  to  that 
principle  in  love  and  faith  and  hope ;  apprehends  him- 
self, in  all  conquest  of  himself  and  in  all  betterment 
of  the  world,  as  fulfilling  upon  the  earth  the  will  of 
that  principle.  The  communion  of  the  Christian  man 
reaches  up  as  high  as  reality  reaches,  and  understands 
itself  to  be  an  intercourse — a  relationship  of  human 
devotion  and  of  communicated  grace — with  the  ulti- 
mate and  highest  principle  of  existence.  In  Christian 
experience  the  whole  concrete  personality  of  the  man — 


THE  TASK  OF  THEOLOGY  15 

as  we  commonly  say,  "the  will" — has  so  surrendered 
itself,  that  its  effort  comes  to  be  to  live  its  life  and 
fashion  its  world  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  abso- 
lute and  creative  principle  of  all  being.  The  man 
knows  his  reconciliation  and  union  with  that  principle ; 
united  thus  to  God,  he  finds  his  true  and  natural  fulfil- 
ment in  working  the  works  of  God ;  finds  his  true  will 
in  doing  the  will  of  Him  that  sent  him.  So  that  the 
Christian  consciousness,  as  it  is  for  itself,  is  pre- 
eminently an  objective  consciousness;  and  an  objective 
consciousness  which  apprehends  its  object  as  the  abso- 
lute reality,  the  life  of  life.  Furthermore,  the  Chris- 
tian consciousness  of  which  this  is  said  is  not  some 
part  or  element  within  our  total  consciousness.  It  is 
our  total  consciousness;  our  total  consciousness  in  its 
acutest  and  most  intimate  apprehension  of  being  con- 
stituted, being  put  under  obligation,  being  called  to 
height  beyond  height,  by  objective  and  absolute  rela- 
tions. I  say  "most  intimate  apprehension,"  because  the 
religious  consciousness  has  this  objectivity,  not  alone 
in  worship,  not  alone  in  institution  and  usage,  in  com- 
mon traditions  and  customs,  but  precisely  there  also 
where  it  is  most  subjective  in  the  sense  of  consisting 
in  feelings  which  each  individual  man  must  feel  for 
himself ;  in  religion,  our  hope  and  love,  our  remorse 
and  shame,  are  what  they  are  through  reference  to 
God.  The  Christian  consciousness  is  not  simply  a 
reliance  of  men  upon  some  forensic  device  or  make- 
shift by  which  human  beings,  revolted  subjects  of  an 
eternal   king,   may  in  his  courts   secure   undeserved 


16      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

escape  from  punishment.  It  is  what  its  Founder,  by 
His  words,  but  still  more  by  being  Himself,  made  it; 
the  knowledge  of  God  which  is  eternal  life.  It  is  an 
apprehension,  I  had  almost  said  a  sense,  of  God,  and 
the  inspiration  and  determining  of  all  our  life  by  that 
sense.  God  is — so  runs  the  typical  utterance  and  con- 
fession of  the  religious  mind — God  is,  and  we  and 
nature  from  Him.  He  is  the  eternal  and  self-existent 
source  and  energy  of  the  world ;  and  our  eternal  life 
is  our  communion  with  Him,  and  with  His  ways  which 
are  the  world's  eternal  order.  Utterly  we  fail  to  appre- 
hend the  religious  consciousness,  as  that  conscious- 
ness is  for  itself,  if  we  suppose  that  we  exhaust  its 
being  and  significance  in  viewing  it  as  simply  a  com- 
bination and  sequence  of  psychical  elements ;  simply 
a  series  of  sensations  and  feelings  (and  complexes  of 
these)  which  are  what  they  are  by  reason  of  the 
psychical  causality  or  continuity  in  that  total  nexus 
and  movement  of  states  which  on  this  view  is  an  indi- 
vidual experience.  From  the  point  of  view  of  such 
psychological  individualism,  the  religious  conscious- 
ness must  be  held  to  be  illusory  precisely  in  that  which 
constitutes  its  religiousness — its  sense  of  relation  to 
an  absolute  principle,  its  sense  of  having  all  its  signifi- 
cance in  that  relation.  In  fact,  from  that  point  of 
view,  such  illusoriness  must  be  ascribed  to  all  expe- 
rience which  has  an  objective  character,  all  experience 
which  is  an  apprehension  of  relations  as  objective; 
unless  into  our  conception  of  a  "psychical  element" 
we  introduce  the  whole  idea  of  a  consciousness  at  once 


THE  TASK  OF  THEOLOGY  17 

subjective  and  objective.  And  in  that  case  we  are 
simply  brought  about  again  to  the  point  from  which  we 
started;  namely,  to  experience  as  it  is,  experience 
apprehending  itself  as  at  once  subjective  and  objective, 
at  once  real  consciousness  and  consciousness  of  the 
real;  and  to  religion,  as  the  highest,  the  most  intense, 
the  all-inclusive  form  of  such  experience. 

This  character  of  Christian  experience  as  in  its 
inmost  fibre  of  passion  and  of  will  a  consciousness  of 
the  Absolute,  so  far  from  being  obscured,  comes  out 
still  more  clearly  in  the  Christian  life  as  a  life  of 
faith.  Our  union  with  God,  in  the  love  which  makes 
us  at  one  with  Him  and  with  all  His  creation,  meets 
in  itself  not  only  with  all  the  difificulties  of  our  life, 
all  the  difficulties  of  the  world  of  human  experience, 
but  also — just  because  it  is  union  with  God — with 
those  difficulties  raised  to  their  greatest  and  most 
tragic  intensity.  All  nature  and  all  history  stand  for 
us  mingled  of  light  and  darkness.  By  the  will  of 
man — by  natural  passions  that  are  rooted  back  into 
the  whole  constitution  and  past  history  of  the  world, 
and  have  in  the  will  of  man  their  channel  and  expres- 
sion— the  causes  of  good  continually  are  baffled.  That 
they  are  finally  defeated,  the  present  circumstances  do 
not  indeed  prove ;  but  no  more  do  the  present  circum- 
stances prove  that  they  are  finally  to  be  successful. 
That  is  just  the  crux  of  the  matter;  the  experience 
which  is  now  our  life  seems  to  reveal  no  absolute 
principle  at  all,  but  only  an  unsettled,  only  a  cruel  and 
most  mysterious  strife.     And  that  not  simply  in  the 


18      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

world  without,  so  that  even  though  we  be  troubled 
about  the  world,  we  can  at  any  rate  be  secure  within. 
On  the  contrary  both  principles  are  by  nature  intrinsic 
to  our  being;  almost  in  one  and  the  same  breath  we 
speak  of  original  sin  and  of  the  anima  naturaliter 
Christiana,  and  feel,  though  with  deep  perplexity,  that 
both  are  true.  But  the  faith  of  the  Christian  man 
means  that  precisely  when  the  perplexity  and  the 
cruelty  of  those  facts  come  upon  him,  his  conscious- 
ness of  an  absolute  principle,  so  far  from  breaking 
down,  asserts  itself  more  strongly  than  ever.  Where 
he  can  see  nothing  absolute ;  where  no  decisive,  no  con- 
clusive, overcoming  and  transformation  of  evil  by 
good  is  evident;  where  there  is  no  bringing  of  the 
whole  history  and  struggle  of  man  to  clearness  by  the 
indisputable  perception  of  a  single  supreme  and  su- 
premely good  principle  realising  its  purpose  in  and 
through  all  the  struggle; — precisely  there  it  is,  in  the 
absence  of  such  immediate  apprehension  and  indis- 
putable perception,  that  the  Christian  man  asserts  his 
confidence  that  there  is  an  absolute  principle  at  work — 
supremely  and  beyond  all  possibility  of  defeat  at 
work — in  the  whole  system  of  existence  in  which  we 
live  our  life  and  have  our  fate.  Such  a  confidence, 
animating  the  whole  of  the  practical  life  and  being  in 
that  practical  life  the  correlate  of  love  and  hope,  is 
the  faith  of  the  Christian  man ;  upon  such  a  confidence 
he  builds  his  life.  There  is  a  God,  he  asserts  to  him- 
self in  face  of  the  obscurities  and  confusions  and 
cruelties  of  our  life.     There  is  a  providence  of  God 


THE  TASK  OF  THEOLOGY  19 

which  "reaches  from  end  to  end,  sweetly  and  strongly 
ordering  all  things,"  so  that  in  it  all  things  form  "a 
wonderful  order."  There  is  a  supremacy  of  God;  so 
complete  that  His  purpose  is  the  ultimate  law  of  the 
world,  and  all  particular  laws  of  nature  and  history 
expressions  and  fulfilments  of  it.  There  is  a  love  of 
God — a  love  which  is  God  Himself  in  action  in  all  His 
creating,  all  His  purpose,  all  His  providence,  all  His 
justice;  and  that  love  is  the  original  fountain  and 
explanation  of  all  created  things ;  the  very  things  that 
work  evil  somehow  owe  to  that  love  their  power  of 
being  or  doing  anything  at  all — apart  from  it  all  things 
would  be  nothingness.  Upon  no  lower  object  than  this 
are  the  love  and  the  faith  and  the  hope  of  the  Christian 
man  directed ;  by  reference  to  no  lower  principle  than 
this  can  such  faith  and  hope  and  love  either  appre- 
hend themselves  or  be  apprehended  by  him  who  would 
know  them.  However  much,  at  first  sight,  the  Chris- 
tian life  that  lives  by  faith  may  seem  to  be  in  nature 
and  idea  the  very  negation  of  a  consciousness  of  an 
absolute  principle,  it  is  really  a  very  high  form  of  such 
a  consciousness;  is  really  such  a  consciousness  victo- 
rious over  its  own  difficulties  and  defining  itself  the 
more  clearly  in  their  presence.  The  theology  which 
can  admit  no  reference  to  an  absolute  principle,  no 
reference  to  a  unity  of  existence  in  and  through  the 
eternally  creative  activity  of  such  a  principle,  may, 
indeed,  work  out  in  such  a  psychological  individualism 
as  was  referred  to  a  moment  ago,  an  analytic  descrip- 
tion of  the  religious  consciousness  in  terms  of  purely 


20      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

subjective  feeling.  But  it  is  a  description  in  which  the 
religious  consciousness  could  by  no  means  recognise 
itself;  could  recognise  only  something  from  which  the 
substance  of  religion  had  been  withdrawn  and  nothing 
but  its  subjective  shadow  left. 

So  far,  then,  for  the  first  point  in  the  view  of  the 
world  implicit  in  Christian  experience;  its  apprehen- 
sion of  reality  as  a  spiritual  world ;  a  spiritual  world 
which  is  truly  a  unity — a  single  providential  order  of 
nature  and  history — by  reason  of  the  supremacy  of 
that  love  of  God  which  is  its  absolute  and  creative 
principle.  But  the  very  way  in  which  that  point  has 
been  stated  indicates  that  there  is  a  second  point  which 
calls  for  statement  equally  decided ;  a  point  the  relation 
of  which  to  the  first  is  not  merely  one  among  the  prob- 
lems of  the  theologian,  but  is  in  all  his  problems  the 
centre  and  nerve  of  difficulty.  In  the  unity  which  is 
the  first  presupposition  of  the  Christian  consciousness, 
there  is  contained  the  deepest  and  most  cruel  of  all 
dualisms.  I  have  already  spoken  of  the  surrender  of 
the  will  which  is  involved  in  Christian  experience ;  a 
surrender  which  is  made  in  repentance  and  love  and 
faith,  and  passes  over  into  and  fulfils  itself  in  still 
greater  faith  and  love.  For  those  who  in  Christian 
homes  gently  are  confirmed  from  the  beginning  in  the 
Christian  way  that  surrender  may  be  easy;  for  the 
adult  soul,  tenacious  of  its  course,  it  can  be  a  convul- 
sive and  revolutionary  struggle.  But  for  all  alike,  it 
is  both  the  entrance  upon  Christian  experience  and  its 


THE  TASK  OF  THEOLOGY  21 

continuous  path.  Such  surrender  means  to  the  Chris- 
tian consciousness  the  reality  of  both  the  wills  involved, 
the  divine  and  the  human ;  means,  that  is  to  say,  that  in 
the  world  which  is  God's  world  there  are  wills  that 
can  go  their  own  way,  whether  it  be  God's  way  or  no. 
That  in  itself  is  a  problem  hard  enough.  But  it  is 
only  the  beginning  of  the  problem  that  confronts  and 
oppresses  the  Christian  mind.  Not  merely  do  we 
apprehend  ourselves  as  wills  that  can  go  our  own  way, 
even  when  it  is  not  God's  way;  but  before  we  truly 
possess  ourselves — before  we  reach  the  place  where 
we  make  deliberate  decisions  upon  a  situation  clearly 
apprehended — we  are  already  involved  in  sin.  Both 
of  ourselves  as  individuals,  and  of  humanity  as  a 
whole,  that  sad  ancient  orthodoxy — confirmed  so  re- 
markably by  the  most  penetrating  insights  of  modern 
science — holds  only  too  true.  Made  as  our  race 
is  of  the  dust  of  the  ground,  struggling  up  as  it  does 
through  the  animal  to  the  spiritual,  before  its  indi- 
vidual members  can  consciously  turn  themselves  to 
God,  before  they  can  devote  to  Him  anything  like  the 
service  of  a  mature  and  deliberate  will,  natural  passions 
are  already  in  possession  of  their  spiritual  being;  so 
that  the  will,  as  it  gradually  comes  to  be,  comes  to  be 
as  a  will  already  sinful.  Thus  sin  is  present  in  the 
world  as  a  universal;  in  it — in  Adam  as  the  typical 
representative  of  its  principle — we  are  all  one.  It  is 
present  in  that  collective  and  historical  life  of  human- 
ity, of  whose  character  each  individual  man  by  contin- 
uities of  nature  and  natural  instinct  is  made  inevitably 


23      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

the  inheritor  and  partaker.  Each  man  is  born  not 
merely  into,  but  in,  a  sinful  world-order.  Its  being  is 
his  being;  its  principle  of  sin,  his  principle — present 
like  some  incredible  and  monstrous  inner  fountain  of 
his  own  nature ;  before  he  is  born,  it  is  assured  that  by 
actions  which  are  his  own  actions,  he  will  make  its 
sin  his  own,  so  that  the  sin  of  the  world  will  have  in 
him  its  individual  root  afresh,  and  will  live  in  him  in 
deeds  that  have  their  origin  in  his  own  personal  will. 

This,  then,  is  the  fearful  dilemma  of  the  Christian 
mind.  It  believes  to  the  uttermost — it  is  of  its  very 
essence  so  to  believe — in  the  supremacy  of  God.  But 
here  is  the  order  of  God's  world  so  constituted  that 
men,  in  the  process  in  which  they  come  to  be  them- 
selves, come  to  be  sinful.  And  sin  is  all  that  God  hates. 
The  more  intense  is  the  Christian  experience,  the  more 
acute  is  the  sense  alike  of  the  reality  and  of  the  hide- 
ousness  of  sin.  Sin  is  that  loathsome  thing,  that  hateful 
thing;  there  is  no  such  thing  as  splendid  sin,  no  such 
thing  as  magnificent  vice ;  it  is  all  littleness  and  cruelty 
and  deformity  and  meanness ;  utterly  it  is  alien  from 
God.  And  consider  what  things  come  to  be  upon  the 
earth  as,  one  after  another,  the  generations  of  men 
are  born  into,  and  take  up  for  themselves,  the  sin  of 
their  race;  consider  what  the  sinful  will  of  man  has 
made  of  the  world.  It  is  God's  world,  the  Christian 
man  says  to  his  heart;  in  God's  goodness,  good  must 
be  its  end — its  end,  and  everywhere  in  it  a  divinely 
victorious  power;  a  good  as  concrete  and  many-sided 
as  is  the  practical  and  passionate  and  contemplative 


THE  TASK  OF  THEOLOGY  23 

spirit  of  man.  But  as  the  Christian  man  stands  in  it, 
and  its  blood  is  his  blood,  its  life  his  life,  and  every 
deed  done  upon  the  earth  a  part  of  his  own  soul — as 
he  stands  there,  through  what  fearful  media  he  has  to 
look  upon  God.  These  strange  defeats  of  good  men 
and  good  causes;  these  unspeakable  and  devilish 
cruelties  which  from  strong  and  self-indulgent  men 
come  upon  the  helpless,  upon  the  weak,  upon  the 
easily  tempted;  this  turning  awry  of  the  great 
enginery  of  the  social  order  by  masterful  hands,  until 
it  drags  on  together  in  one  seemingly  inevitable  course, 
the  oppressors  and  the  oppressed;  those  multitudes 
and  nations  to  whom,  through  the  whole  of  life,  no 
opportunity  is  given  for  any  refinement  of  the  spirit 
or  any  touch  of  the  sweet  humanities,  or  any  vision, 
whether  of  heaven  or  of  earth,  that  goes  beyond  the 
sordid  streets,  the  foul  companions,  the  dull  and  jaded 
labour; — what  can  a  man — a  man  with  the  moral 
sensitiveness  of  high  religion  in  his  soul — think  of 
the  supremacy  of  God  in  a  world  in  whose  order  and 
constitution  such  things  are  both  possible  and  actual? 
Nay,  think  of  the  worst  case  of  all;  these  innumer- 
able children  defiled  in  body  and  spirit  from  before 
their  birth,  and  knowing  only  evil  all  their  life  long — 
conscience  itself  to  them  only  the  source  of  some 
further  wickedness  as  its  dim  irritation  stirs  to  greater 
restlessness  their  undisciplined  nature.  Poor  chil- 
dren— and  presently  upon  them,  as  upon  all  the  con- 
fused and  undetermined  moral  struggle  of  the  world, 
there  falls  the  dark;  and  what  manner  of  spirit  is  it 


34      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

that  they  carry  with  them  to  meet  whatever  Hfe  and 
whatever  God  there  may  be  after  death?  And,  as  if 
these  things  were  not  enough,  the  poor  animal  earth 
must  suffer  too,  preparing  the  way  for  our  sinful 
humanity;  behind  our  human  history  there  rises,  like 
a  receding  but  menacing  shadow,  another  history  in 
which  it  is  probable  that  some  of  our  natural  instincts 
slowly  gathered  their  shape;  a  history  filled  with  the 
sufferings  of  animal  life,  filled  with  the  cruelties  of 
animal  war.  Through  these  things — things  not  exter- 
nal to  him,  but  through  his  unity  with  his  race  a  part 
of  himself,  in  that  original  sin  which  of  all  realities 
of  experience  is  one  of  the  most  terribly  real — through 
these  things  the  Christian  man  has  to  look  upon  God, 
In  the  presence  of  such  things,  what  can  his  faith  do  ? 
What  it  ultimately  can  do,  and  in  innumerable  men 
and  women  has  done,  I  must  try  presently  to  tell.  But 
here  what  we  have  to  consider  is  that  only  too  often 
that  faith  breaks  down ;  breaks  down  and  becomes 
little  better  than  a  compromise  of  hope  with  blindness 
and  with  doubt.  And  that  not  always  in  mere  weak- 
ness or  in  dishonourable  treason;  but  often  through 
that  in  which  Christian  men  are  most  Christian.  I  do 
not  mean  that  slighter  and  shallower — though  still 
beautiful — purity  of  heart  which  shrinks  from  the 
least  contact  with  the  world.  There  is  a  greater 
purity  of  heart  which  knows  that  our  human  nature 
has  come  up  out  of  a  great  deep;  and  even  while  it 
seeks  to  keep  itself  unspotted  from  the  world,  it  pities 
the  world  with  the  pity  of  a  great  affection  and  a 


THE  TASK  OF  THEOLOGY  25 

great  hope — the  hope  which  sees  "every  heart  await- 
ing" it, 

— another 
Friend  in  the  blameless  family  of  God. 

I  mean  rather  that  anger  of  Christian  men  against  the 
innocent  suffering  of  which  the  world  is  full;  above 
all,  against  that  intelligent  and  effective  selfishness  of 
strong  men,  which  is  now  one  of  the  most  masterful 
forces  of  our  civilisation  and  compared  with  whose 
deliberate  and  self-centred  cruelty  the  earthly  and 
bestial  vileness  of  the  slums  seems  almost  clean.  In 
such  a  world  as  ours,  we  are  in  our  faith  as  was 
the  impetuous  disciple  upon  the  Galilsean  lake.  His 
Lord  was  there ;  visible,  clear  before  his  eyes.  But  he 
knew — alas,  how  well  he  knew — the  resistless  and  in- 
variable cruelty  of  the  tempest-driven  sea;  and  the 
very  utterance  of  his  faith  became  a  cry  for  the  help 
of  his  unbelief. 

Often  this  breaking  down  of  faith  becomes  deter- 
minative— I  will  not  say  in  the  Christian  consciousness 
(that  is  impossible) — but  in  the  theological  systems 
in  which  that  consciousness  seeks  to  make  itself  intel- 
lectually explicit.  Specially  does  this  take  place  in 
stern  ages  of  the  church,  when  it  has  to  struggle  des- 
perately against  the  organised  and  masterful  sin  of 
the  world ;  or  in  those  great  men  who  enter  upon  reli- 
gion only  through  such  a  struggle  with  the  evil  in  the 
world  and  the  evil  in  themselves  that  to  the  end  of  life 
they  instinctively  look  upon  this  world  and  this  human 
nature  of  ours  as  forming  an  order  of  final  and  in- 


26      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

trinsic  evil,  alien  from  God  and  hostile  to  God.  The 
dualism  between  sin  and  righteousness,  between  good 
and  evil  as  deliberate  principles  of  will,  becomes  some- 
thing other  than  a  tragic  and  only  too  terribly  real 
dualism  within  one  order  of  existence;  it  becomes  the 
last  word  in  a  Manichgean  view  of  the  world.  In  the 
world  which  is  our  world — the  world  in  which  the 
Christian  man  does  and  must  live,  and  from  whose 
eternal  and  fundamental  order  there  is  for  ever  and 
for  ever  no  escape  either  for  him  or  for  any  spirit 
that  lives — there  is  a  hopeless  dualism  of  ultimate 
powers.  Sin  becomes  an  absolute  principle;  as  abso- 
lute (though  this  is  never  expressed  in  set  words)  as 
God.  We,  involved  in  sin,  or  having  enacted  it,  are 
in  our  natural  being  altogether  foreign  to  God  and  to 
His  family;  the  whole  being  and  nature  of  our  world 
is  summed  up  in  this,  that  it  lies  in  sin  and  is  lost, 
alien  from  God.  Grace,  coming  from  above,  myste- 
riously may  save  some.  But  nature  and  grace  stand 
intrinsically  and  eternally  apart ;  the  triumph  of  one 
meaning  to  the  other  not  fulfilment  but  subjection  or 
extinction.  The  principle  of  evil  has  its  own  natural 
sphere  of  dominion ;  a  sphere  of  reality  whose  exist- 
ence is  to  be  explained  without  reference  to  the  crea- 
tive love  of  God ;  a  sphere  of  reality  where,  eternally 
and  in  the  nature  of  things,  the  love  of  God  has  no 
supremacy. 

This  is  not  only  a  theology  held  with  deep  and 
painful  conviction  by  a  few  specially  powerful  and 
troubled  minds.     It  is  a  point  of  view  widely,  though 


THE  TASK  OF  THEOLOGY  27 

unclearly  prevalent — along  with  quite  different  points 
of  view — in  what  may  be  called  the  popular  mind  of 
the  church.  There,  as  in  all  its  occurrences,  the  root 
and  suggestion  of  it  lies  in  those  searching,  those 
agonising,  experiences  to  which  reference  has  just 
been  made.  But  other  and  weaker  elements  enter. 
For  instance,  there  is  in  our  humanity,  and  therefore 
in  the  mind  of  the  church,  no  slight  touch  of  that 
hard  and  rather  earthly  common-sense  which  manifests 
itself  in  Deism.  This  is  the  shrinking  from  that  source 
of  man's  intolerable  pain,  and  of  his  still  more  intoler- 
able enthusiasm — the  thought  of  God  as  intimately  in 
relation  with  the  world.  Not  too  closely  should  the 
world  be  drawn  to  those  consuming  fires,  the  perfec- 
tion and  the  love  of  God.  Let  the  world  with  good 
sense  and  enlightened  judgment  go  on  its  common 
way;  it  is  enough  that  God  has  been  its  Creator  and 
will  be  its  judge.  To  this  mind — which,  on  its  intel- 
lectual side,  Hegel  was  wont  to  describe  with  immense 
contempt  as  the  abstract  understanding — religion  is 
scarcely  a  living  communion  with  God.  It  is  morality ; 
though  morality  enlarged  by  looking  backward  to  the 
God  who  has  created,  forward  to  the  God  who  will 
judge.  Even  in  the  great  days  of  the  oecumenical 
formulation,  this  temper  secured  its  expression ;  in 
the  Arianism,  which,  as  Dr.  Hastings  Rashdall  almost 
too  bluntly  puts  it,  is  the  notion  of  a  God  who  creates 
a  demi-god  and  then  delegates  to  him  the  government 
of  the  universe.  Then,  too,  there  is  in  popular  thought 
what  may  be  described  as  the  habit  of  holding  things 


28      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

together  by  letting  them  stand  apart.  Different  posi- 
tions, not  easily  reconciled,  are  felt,  acutely  and  deeply, 
to  be  true ;  and  are  simply  held  side  by  side ;  a  method 
at  once  honourable  and  inevitable  in  popular  thought; 
not  so  honourable  in  deliberate  theology  when  systems 
are  built  up  in  separate  compartments,  and  a  conclu- 
sion in  one  is  not  felt  to  stand  in  the  way  of  the  oppo- 
site conclusion  in  another.  This  popular  mind  of 
Christianity  has  in  our  own  day  received  perhaps  the 
most  remarkable  formulation  ever  given  to  it.  That 
great  and  admirable  man  who  has  just  been  taken 
from  us^  expressed  it,  with  his  lightning-like  pene- 
tration of  mind,  as  the  dualistic  Theism  whose  God  is 
one  member  of  a  pluralistic  system,  an  essentially 
finite  being  within  the  cosmos,  working  in  an  external 
environment.^ 

Professor  James  was  concerned  to  bring  to  expres- 
sion the  popular  mind  of  Christianity  just  as  it  stands ; 
as  though  upon  some  unreflective  bearer  of  that  mind 
he  were  conferring  his  own  gift  of  vivid  speech.  And 
his  very  success  in  that  forces  upon  the  theologian, 
intent  on  another  task,  a  problem  of  method.  How 
shall  the  theologian  do  justice  to  the  Christian  con- 
sciousness?   In  particular,  how  shall  he  deal  with  that 

1  Professor  William  James  died  on  August  26,   1910. 

2  A  Pluralistic  Universe,  pp.  Ill,  124,  240. — It  is  most  interesting 
to  compare  the  emergence  in  another  intellectual  atmosphere  and  upon 
a  different  level  of  thought,  of  this  same  idea  of  a  Cod  who  is  not  abso- 
lute, a  reason  which  is  not  co-extensive  with  reality:  namely,  in  the  idea 
of  Contingency  which  perpetually  breaks  the  imity  of  the  Platonic  and 
Aristotelian  Idealism;  the  belief  that  there  is  something  in  the  nature 
of  reality  which  cannot  be  an  object  for  science — not  because  it  is  above 
reason,  but  because  it  escapes  law  and  is  below  reason. 


THE  TASK  OF  THEOLOGY  29 

popular  mind  of  Christianity  so  as  to  do  justice,  on 
the  one  hand,  to  the  Christianity  operative  in  that 
mind,  and,  on  the  other  hand,  to  that  mind  as  possessed, 
though  not  with  intellectual  clearness,  by  Christian- 
ity? Manifestly,  not  alone  by  making  himself  its  lit- 
eral spokesman;  not  alone  by  translating  into  some 
language  of  science  its  ideas  exactly  as  they  now 
stand ;  but  rather  by  penetrating  to  the  deep  and  organ- 
ising principles  which  really  are  its  life,  but  which  it 
cannot  always  bring  to  adequate  and  consistent  ex- 
pression, cannot  always  set  free  from  alien  and  limit- 
ing ideas  such  as  only  too  often  are  gathered  from 
experience  or  inherited  like  a  fateful  second  nature. 
Let  us  turn  once  more,  then,  to  the  present  Christian 
consciousness  as  the  life  of  faith  and  love;  the  life 
in  which,  through  love  and  faith,  sin  is  overcome, 
goodness  achieved,  the  will  of  God  fulfilled  in  the 
world  of  our  life.  The  dualistic  Theism  which  has 
just  been  in  question,  however  widely  it  may  appear 
in  the  popular  thought  of  the  church,  however  strik- 
ingly it  may  express  itself  in  great  theologies,  is  not  the 
full  mind,  is  not  the  final  word  of  Christianity  as  that 
life  of  faith  and  love.  It  is  not  the  ultimate  and  cen- 
tral, though  in  times  of  desperate  struggle  it  may  well 
be  the  immediate  and  most  urgent,  point  of  view  of 
the  Christian  consciousness.  That  consciousness,  in 
its  deep  and  inner  life — a  life  without  which  there 
could  not  be  enduringly  a  church  and  the  popular 
mind  of  a  church — is  a  love  that  recognises  no  ulti- 
mate barriers,  a  hope  that  consents  to  no  thought  of 


30      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

final  defeat.  This  is  true,  even  when  we  take  the 
Christian  consciousness  before  it  is  aware  of  the  full 
width  of  its  own  love  and  hope;  when  we  take  it  in 
that  least  developed  form  where  it  is  simply  a  con- 
sciousness of  individual  salvation.  To  the  true  Chris- 
tian, salvation,  even  in  this  individualistic  apprehension 
of  it,  is  at  any  rate  real  salvation;  no  merely  forensic 
procedure,  but  a  coming  into  likeness  to  the  char- 
acter of  God.  And  such  salvation  implies  a  unity  m 
which  the  dualism  is  eternally  overcome,  a  supremacy 
of  God  working  in  love  and  grace  through  all  that 
system  of  nature  and  history  in  which  man's  being 
is  imparted  to  him.  For  in  order  that  a  man  may  be 
merely  capable  of  salvation,  the  order  of  nature  and 
history,  in  which  he  receives  his  being,  can  neither 
exist  apart  from  the  God  who  saves,  nor  contain  any 
power  able  effectively  to  resist  God;  except  in  so  far 
as  such  a  power  is  God's  own  gift — and  God's  gifts 
cannot  be  out  of  relation  to  His  purpose  and  to 
that  nature  of  love  and  righteousness  of  which  His 
purpose  is  the  expression.  And  when  from  that 
lowest  and  most  individualistic  form  of  the  Christian 
consciousness  we  pass  to  the  form  in  which  it  more 
adequately  realises  its  own  idea,  the  form  in  which 
the  Christian  man  casts  himself  in  faith  upon  God 
for  the  salvation  of  the  world — a  salvation  in  which 
his  own  individual  salvation  appears  as  a  single  ele- 
ment in  a  greater  system,  apart  from  which  it  would 
be  devoid  of  its  own  deepest  reality  and  significance — 
there  we  see  the  Christian  consciousness  with  no  doubt 


THE  TASK  OF  THEOLOGY  31 

at  all  about  the  supremacy  of  God,  and  about  the 
unity  of  nature  and  of  history  in  and  through  that 
supremacy.  The  idea  of  a  power  able  to  defeat  God, 
able  to  take  possession  of  God's  world  or  of  part  of  it, 
and,  like  another  God  over  against  God,  to  hold  God 
and  His  grace  far  from  it ;  the  idea  of  a  sphere  of 
reality  with  whose  coming  into  being,  and  with  whose 
continued  existence,  the  love  of  God  has  intrinsically 
nothing  to  do ;  the  idea,  in  a  word,  of  an  essentially 
dualistic  universe; — that,  to  the  developed  Christian 
consciousness,  the  Christian  consciousness  in  clear  pos- 
session of  itself,  is  the  absurdity  of  absurdities ;  is  the 
fall  from  Christian  faith  and  love  into  a  non-Christian 
mind.  There  may  indeed  be  a  stage  in  Christian  expe- 
rience— that  struggling  and  well-nigh  desperate  stage 
of  which  Professor  James  had  so  vividly  sympathetic 
an  understanding — in  which  all  things  are  seen  under 
the  aspect  of  war,  and  God  is  taken,  not  as  the  source 
of  all  life,  the  absolute  spirit  from  and  in  whom  we 
have  our  being,  but  as  a  dualistic  God,  a  finite  and 
limited  Deity  who  maintains  as  best  He  can  the  war 
with  His  great  enemy.  And  there  may  indeed  be 
servants  of  God  who  never  pass  beyond  that  stage 
of  experience,  and  in  whom  the  religious  mind  never 
rises  above  that  militant  form.  They  have  no  relief 
from  the  struggle  with  a  vicious  nature,  or  with  evil 
men ;  and  the  hope  which  sustains  them  is  that  at  last 
God  will  arise  and  His  enemies  be  scattered.  Yet  we 
should  very  radically  fail  to  apprehend  the  Christian 
consciousness  if  we  took  that  to  be  the  conception  of 


32      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

God  upon  which  it  really  proceeds,  and  which  it  comes 
explicitly  to  hold  as  it  grows  able  to  enter  into  itself 
with  reflective  clearness,  and  to  do  itself  intellectual 
justice;  to  do  itself  intellectual  justice,  not  by  becom- 
ing something  new,  but  by  discerning  what  really  it 
always  was.  A  monism  must  be  deep  as  eternity,  must 
be  altogether  concrete,  must  be  courageous  to  the  last 
degree,  if  it  is  to  contain  within  itself  the  dualism  that 
in  many  a  strong  man  the  Christian  consciousness 
knows ;  knows  in  the  agony  of  repentance  which 
searches  but  the  deeper,  the  more  liberal  and  magnani- 
mous the  heart  becomes ;  knows  in  the  appalling  vision 
of  that  creation  of  God,  the  world  of  our  natural 
humanity,  as  infected  everywhere  by  sin.  Yet  such 
is  the  monism  of  the  Christian  consciousness,  when, 
as  the  highest  and  all-inclusive  consciousness  of  our 
life,  it  apprehends  its  own  meaning  and  its  own  prin- 
ciple. It  is  in  good  truth  a  first  work  of  Christianity 
to  make  the  sense  of  sin  a  searching  and  commanding 
power.  Yet  there  could  be  no  Christian  conscious- 
ness at  all,  but  only  some  madness  of  despair,  unless 
to  sinful  man  there  were  open  in  his  faith  a  triumph 
both  of  practice  and  of  vision,  over  sin.  So  that  the 
Christian  mind  cannot  regard  sin  as  a  final  or  eternal 
thing,  co-ordinate  with  God.  Even  where  it  can  get 
no  solution  of  the  problem  such  as  satisfies  the  intellect, 
it  still  has  no  doubt  that  there  is  a  supremacy  of  good ; 
no  doubt  that  God  veritably  is  God.  In  presence  of 
the  hard  facts  of  the  world — its  incompleteness,  its 
cruelties,  its  evil,  its  sin,  souls  that  are  shut  out  of 


THE  TASK  OF  THEOLOGY  33 

good  and  souls  that  trample  it  under  foot — the  Chris- 
tian man  declares  in  his  heart,  that  in  spite  of  all  these 
things  God  is  supreme  in  His  world;  supreme  and 
supremely  good;  and  this  not  in  any  easy  supremacy 
and  goodness  of  remote  and  empty  Sabbaths,  but  here 
in  the  actual  creation  and  government  of  His  world. 
In  the  whole  of  His  creative  work — so  the  man  whose 
mind  is  fashioned  upon  the  love  of  God  comes  late 
or  soon  to  believe — God  has  a  purpose  of  good ;  a 
purpose  which  not  only  will  be,  but  is  being,  realised ; 
so  that  even  though  we  seem  to  stand  amid  the  con- 
tinual wreck  of  good  causes,  yet  all  things  are  work- 
ing together  for  that  good  which  eternally  is  the  pur- 
pose of  creation,  and  here  upon  the  earth  more  and 
more  is  dawning  upon  the  hearts  of  good  men,  more 
and  more  is  apprehending  them  and  being  appre- 
hended by  them,  more  and  more  is  being  chosen  by 
them  as  the  purpose  of  their  life. 

And  as  for  death,  and  all  its  seal  upon  us  of  a 
struggle  arrested,  of  love  defeated  at  last,  of  light 
kindled  to  perish — to  the  faith  in  God  which  maintains 
itself  in  the  presence  of  evil  and  of  sin,  I  had  almost 
said  that  death  is  a  little  thing.  It  lays  its  heavy  bur- 
den upon  our  human  affections ;  it  is  scarcely  a  burden 
to  our  faith.  Our  forefathers,  struggling  titanically, 
after  the  rule  of  the  Caesars  was  gone,  with  nature 
and  natural  passions,  with  a  world  of  violence  and  its 
immeasurably  difficult  political  and  social  problems, 
saw  the  fulfilment  hereafter  of  our  life  as  a  city  where- 
in the  souls  of  men  at  last  were  safe;  a  tranquil  city, 


34      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

seen  from  afar,  the  very  thought  of  which  roused  in 
the  exile  the  longing  for  his  home,  in  the  viator  the 
yearning  to  become  comprehensor.  To-day  our  imagi- 
nation has  no  picture  of  the  city;  we  know  not  the 
song  which  the  joyful  mother  sings  with  her  children. 
But  the  Christian  heart  looks  forward  as  truly  as 
ever  to  a  fulfilment  of  the  essential  objects  and  pur- 
poses of  the  Christian  life;  the  unity  of  man  with 
God,  and  of  men  with  one  another,  in  a  progressive 
or  perfected  social  order  in  which  men  come  to  be  all 
that  they  have  it  in  them  to  be,  and  none  serves  selfish 
purposes  but  each  serves  the  good  of  all ;  and  so  God 
Himself  is  fulfilled.  Such  a  hope  is  part  of  the  inner 
conviction  with  which  the  Christian  consciousness  faces 
the  tragic  fragmentariness  and  incompleteness  of  our 
life,  even  as  it  faces  its  evil  and  its  sin;  the  conviction 
that  God  is  supreme,  that  nothing  in  the  order  of  the 
world  is  out  of  relation  to  Him,  and  that,  in  His 
supremacy.  His  creative  beginnings,  whether  in  the 
universal  system  of  the  world,  or  in  the  communica- 
tion of  life  to  individual  spirits,  cannot  fail,  but  must 
have  their  appropriate  fulfilments. 

To  do  justice  to  the  Christian  mind  we  must  insist, 
then,  upon  its  acute  sense  of  those  characters  of  our 
experience  which  seem  most  to  oppose  any  monistic 
or  unitary  view  of  the  world :  its  sense  of  the  frailty 
of  our  nature,  the  pitiable  incompleteness  of  our  life; 
its  sense  of  the  evil  and  imperfection  of  the  world ; 
above  all,  its  sense  of  sin — the  appalling  contrast  as 
our  nature  stands  over  against  high  God.     There  is 


THE  TASK  OF  THEOLOGY  35 

no  apprehension  of  the  Christian  consciousness  at  all, 
as  it  must  be  in  any  such  soul  as  that  of  man,  without 
insisting  to  the  uttermost  upon  the  sense  of  sin.  To 
the  uttermost;  but  not  wrongly.  And  it  is  insisting 
upon  it  wrongly  to  make  it  the  last  word;  the  last 
word,  so  that  the  Christian  view  of  the  world  is  with 
finality  a  dualistic  view.  Most  truly  it  is  the  business 
of  Christianity  to  make  the  sense  of  sin  an  imperious 
thing.  Yet,  so  long  as  it  is  not  driven  beyond  Chris- 
tianity by  the  very  agony  of  the  struggle  with  sin,  the 
Christian  consciousness  never,  as  a  consciousness  of 
despair,  makes  sin  the  final  thing.  Such  a  sense  of 
sin,  so  far  from  being  Christian,  would  lead  to  the 
opposite  of  Christianity.  The  Christian  consciousness 
of  sin  is  part  of — has  its  intensity  and  searching  power 
as  part  of — a  larger  consciousness ;  a  consciousness  of 
God  and  of  salvation.  The  sense  of  sin  would  grow 
dull  indeed,  if  it  were  part  of  the  consciousness  of  a 
world  in  which  God  is  only  half  supreme,  and  His 
power  to  open  to  us  a  way  of  salvation  problematical. 
Would  grow  dull;  nay,  would  flame  up  into  the  sense 
of  an  inextinguishable  and  irremediable  wrong,  only 
to  burn  down  into  the  grim  endurance  of  men  who 
undergo  a  hopeless  fate. 

To  put  this  in  another  way,  it  is  the  moral  dualism 
of  the  world  that  constitutes  our  need  of  salvation; 
but  what  makes  the  salvation  possible  is  only  the  fact 
that  there  is  a  still  profounder  monism  through  the 
supremacy  and  in  the  love  of  God.  What  we  must 
say,  to  be  true  to  the  facts  of  the  Christian  conscious 


36      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

ness,  is  that  the  Christian  Hfe  has  one  inner  and  cen- 
tral principle.  As  devotion  to  God,  as  the  shaping 
energy  of  disposition  and  of  action,  it  is  love.  As 
refusing  to  be  overcome  by  the  appalling  moral  prob- 
lem of  the  world's  order,  or  by  any  of  the  discourag- 
ing facts  of  the  world  and  of  our  own  human  nature, 
it  is  faith  and  hope.  As  the  unity  of  all  these,  the 
unity  of  love  and  hope  and  faith,  it  is  that  practical 
Christian  mind,  which  is  the  power  of  God  in  the 
world  for  the  overcoming  of  evil ;  for  the  transform- 
ing of  evil  men  into  good  men,  and  evil  societies  into 
good  societies,  in  that  salvation  in  which  "all  things 
are  transformed  but  love."^ 

While,  then,  we  say  that  the  view  of  the  world 
contained  implicitly  in  the  Christian  consciousness  is 
at  once  a  unitary  and  a  divided  view;  while  we  say 
that  it  has  in  it  at  once  a  monism  and  a  dualism,  and 
each  of  these  in  the  intensest  possible  form ;  while  we 
recognise  as  the  two  great  voices  of  the  Christian  con- 
fession in  all  ages,  on  the  one  hand  the  faith  and  love 
and  hope  in  which  a  man  apprehends  himself  as  given 

1  For  this  total  Christian  mind  which  is  at  once  love  and  confidence, 
hope  and  belief,  great  masters  of  inner  experience  like  Augustine  and 
Luther  commonly  (and  with  New  Testament  warrant)  use  the  term 
"faith";  making  faith  the  essential  and  all-inclusive  principle  of  the 
Christian  man's  response  to  the  grace  of  God.  And  this  is  reasonable 
enough:  for  on  the  one  hand  the  principle  of  the  Christian  mind  is  so 
truly  a  single  principle  that  any  one  of  its  aspects  or  manifestations 
includes  all  the  others;  while,  on  the  other  hand,  the  whole  action  of 
the  Christian  mind  in  asserting,  in  this  dim  and  imperfect  life,  a  rela- 
tion with  the  absolute  principle  of  the  universe,  is  a  rising  above  sight, 
a  rising  above  present  particular  facts,  so  remarkable  as  to  make  it  no 
wonder  that  the  name  appropriate  to  it  should  be  given  to  the  whole 
Christian   consciousness. 


THE  TASK  OF  THEOLOGY  37 

to  a  God  who  is  absolutely  supreme  in  His  universe, 
but  on  the  other  hand  the  starting  back  in  horror  from 
any  thought  of  connecting  organically  with  God  a 
world  which  lies  in  sin,  a  nature  that  is  to  be  repented 
of  and  overcome : — while  we  say  all  this,  we  must 
also  say  that  in  the  Christian  consciousness  the  two 
attitudes  do  not  stand  side  by  side,  simply  equal  and 
unreconciled.  Whenever  the  Christian  consciousness 
has  entered  clearly  into  possession  of  itself,  and  has 
become  explicitly  what  implicitly  it  always  and  es- 
sentially is,  its  intense  and  passionate  dualism  is  taken 
up  into  a  still  more  intense  and  passionate  monism, 
triumphant  in  faith ;  a  monism  which  we  may  express 
by  turning  a  famous  saying  of  Hegel's  into  language 
still  higher  and  more  confident  than  Hegel's  own :  there 
is  nothing  in  the  nature  of  things  that  permanently  and 
finally  can  give  the  lie  to  the  desire  and  hope  of  the 
Christian  man;  his  desire  and  hope  not  for  his  own 
individual  salvation  alone,  but  for  the  race  in  which 
he  counts  for  one  and  no  more  than  one ;  the  race  with 
which  all  his  being  is  organically  connected,  in  whose 
life  he  lives,  and  whose  fate — down  to  that  of  the  last 
forgotten  and  degraded  child  of  the  brute  earth — is 
his  own  fate,  and  is  felt  as  his  own. 

So  far,  then,  for  that  second  point:  how  the  Chris- 
tian consciousness,  in  its  monism  of  faith — its  confi- 
dence in  a  supreme,  an  absolute,  a  loving  God — meets 
and  overcomes  a  dualism  the  deepest  and  most  terrible 
that  reality  can  contain.     Now  I  come  to  the  third 


38      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

point;  not  as  something  to  be  added  externally  to  the 
former  two,  but  rather  as  something  which  at  once 
is  implied  in  them  and  implies  them  in  itself ;  implies 
and  contains  them  in  itself,  as  a  synthesis  or  a  uni- 
versal implies  and  contains  the  diverse  elements  and 
factors,  to  which  it  gives  the  meaning  that  they  really 
have,  and  in  which  it  expresses  the  fulness  of  its  own 
meaning.  To  put  it  in  another  way,  what  we  now 
come  to  is  what  one  may  call  the  specific  centre  of 
gravity  of  the  Christian  mind ;  its  centre  of  gravity 
in  the  sense  that  here  its  two  great  sides  are  found, 
not  held  together  solely  by  that  kind  of  faith  which 
is  a  mere  desperate  venture,  but  held  together  in  a 
great  idea  which  is  their  intelligible  reconciliation.  As 
we  saw  at  the  beginning,  the  Christian  consciousness, 
in  its  apprehension  of  our  life,  is  primarily  a  con- 
sciousness of  salvation.  It  is  in  the  thought  of  salva- 
tion— of  a  redemption  of  man  from  evil  conditions 
and  evil  will — that  it  really  holds  together,  unifies, 
reconciles,  these  two  great  sides  of  itself  which  seem 
so  hopelessly  irreconcilable :  its  conception  of  God 
as  righteous  and  loving,  and  as  absolutely  supreme 
in  the  world;  and  its  conception  of  the  world  as 
nevertheless  not  merely  a  world  of  imperfection, 
but  a  world  which  stands  in  sin.  In  the  ordinary 
Christian  consciousness  that  reconciliation  is  scarcely 
brought  to  intellectual  clearness.  To  most  of  us 
Christian  men,  in  our  life  of  affairs  and  of  daily 
labour,  the  vision  that  penetrates  the  mystery  of  this 
world  is  one  almost  entirely  of  affection  and  of  con- 


THE  TASK  OF  THEOLOGY  39 

science.  We  do  but  know  that  we  are  sinful  men,  and 
that  in  all  the  glory  of  the  world  a  strange  evil  is  inter- 
mingled ;  but  that  in  God,  who  is  the  Lord  of  all  things, 
we  have  our  salvation.  To  the  full  significance  of  our 
idea  of  redemption — the  deep  philosophy  in  it  that  en- 
lightens the  world — we  cannot  do  justice;  cannot  set 
it  in  its  place  in  the  vision  which  is  to  the  theology,  to 
the  philosophy,  to  the  poetry  of  man,  a  common  goal — 
the  clear  and  secure  consciousness  in  which  feeling  goes 
hand  in  hand  with  systematic  intelligence,  passion  is 
with  reason  made  one,  and  the  spirit  of  man,  compact 
of  affection  and  of  contemplation,  sees  into  the  life  of 
things.  Rather  in  our  thought — the  popular  thought 
of  the  church  which,  as  we  saw,  Professor  James  so 
penetratingly  grasped  and  expressed — the  Christian 
idea  of  redemption  has  place  along  with  other  weaker 
and  discordant  elements.  But  to  enter  into  the  deep 
meaning  of  it,  to  see  in  it  the  solution  of  the  last  and 
most  desperate  problems  of  our  life — this  has  been 
precisely  the  work  of  Christian  theology  in  its  great 
and  central  line,  its  oecumenical  movement.^     In  that 


1  Without  offending  against  generosity  and  courtesy,  one  may  per- 
haps say  that  the  cecumenical  theology  is  to  the  popular  mind  of  the 
church  what  science  and  philosophy  are  to  the  popular  mind  as  a  secular 
consciousness.  The  popular  mind,  as  a  secular  consciousness  of  the 
world,  is  not  science  and  philosophy  ;  but  it  is  the  possibility  of  science 
and  philosophy,  and  only  in  science  and  philosophy  do  we  do  justice  to 
its  content.  So  with  oecumenical  theology  and  the  popular  mind  of 
Christianity.  But  by  this  is  not  meant  that  the  present  Christian  con- 
sciousness is  to  be  enslaved  even  to  its  own  great  past;  as  though 
Christian  men  of  to-day  could  settle  no  problems  for  themselves  except 
by  summoning  from  the  dead  an  ancient  and  tremendous  people  of 
theologfians.  Science  and  philosophy  maintain  their  place  in  our  life 
only   by   making  their   truth   still   wider,   still   deeper,   still   more   living. 


40      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

movement  there  may  not  seldom  have  been  in  the 
human  agents  fear  and  hate,  not  seldom  panic  and  the 
cruel  follies  of  panic ;  but  the  theology  itself  looks  with 
large  and  penetrating  and  speculative  mind  upon  its 
own  great  objects.  Its  own  great  objects:  the  self- 
communicating  love  of  God  in  which  a  world  of  free 

for  each  successive  generation  of  men.  So,  too,  it  must  be  with  theology. 
Unless,  age  by  age,  it  has  in  its  nostrils  the  breath  of  life,  no  authority 
can  save  it. 

This  relation  of  oecumenical  theology  to  the  popular  thought  of 
Christianity  has,  of  course,  a  most  important  bearing  upon  the  question 
which  came  forward  earlier  (see  pp.  28-29  above)  in  the  lecture;  the 
question  how  we  are  to  deal  with  that  popular  Christian  mind  so  as 
really  to  do  justice  to  it — to  do  justice  to  it  not  alone  by  finding  for 
its  immediate  declarations  a  more  telling  and  incisive  voice,  but  still 
more  by  penetrating  to  the  organising  principles  which  are  its  deep  and 
inner  life. 

To  call  the  theology  which  finds  its  unifying  centre  in  the  idea  of 
the  Incarnation,  oecumenical,  is  to  make  for  it  an  immense  claim  to  objec- 
tive significance,  with  regard  both  to  historical  position  and  to  permanent 
scientific  value.  The  feeling  which  animates  these  lectures  is  that  that 
immense  claim  is  essentially  just.  But  in  such  a  connexion  one 
thing  should  always  be  remembered.  lie  alone  has  the  right  to 
the  conception  of  an  oecumenical  theology,  as  one  of  the  working 
conceptions  of  his  life,  who  sees  in  that  conception  the  largest,  the 
kindliest,  the  most  magnanimous  of  all  human  ideas.  And  furthermore, 
there  is  a  sense  in  which  the  background  of  the  Councils  is  more  impor- 
tant than  the  Councils  themselves.  The  negotiations  and  majority  votes 
of  councils,  while  late  or  soon  they  may  bring  peace  to  a  great  society 
and  thus  may  determine  the  course  of  human  history,  yet  are  fearfully 
unreliable  instruments  for  getting  at  pure  truth.  And  to  suppose  that 
theological  truth — the  knowledge  of  the  ways  of  God  with  man — can  be 
adequately  expressed  in  precise  conciliar  canons,  is  to  misapprehend  the 
very  nature  of  theological  truth.  When  the  apostolic  age  was  once 
gone,  the  most  vital  growth  of  theology  necessarily  took  place  in  the 
passionate  thought  of  innumerable  devout  men  who,  in  the  freedom  of 
individual  and  consecrated  spirits,  entered  into  reflective  possession  of 
the  Christian  tradition,  and  handed  on  a  continually  deepening  in- 
sight; a  continually  deepening  insight  which  here  and  there,  in  some 
great  Father,  secured  for  itself  world-compelling  expression.  The  church 
which  has  in  it  no  place  for  such  freedom  of  devout  thought,  no  place 
for  such  growing  light,  may  be  a  great  and  effective  institution;  it  is  no 
true  home  of  theology. 


THE  TASK  OF  THEOLOGY  41 

spirits  is  created ;  the  further  energies  of  that  love,  by 
which,  when  in  the  long  process  of  creation  sin  arises, 
it  is  met  and  overcome  by  redemption ;  the  setting  forth 
in  the  midst  of  man's  years  upon  the  earth,  of  the 
eternal  Word  in  whom  that  redemption  is  made  mani- 
fest, and  men's  hearts  are  drawn  to  Him,  and  being 
drawn  to  Him  are  drawn  to  their  salvation.  In  the 
oecumenical  theology,  there  is  no  doubt  that  the  human 
world  stands  in  sin ;  there  is  also  no  doubt  that  God  is 
good  and  is  the  absolute  principle  of  the  world — not  a 
greater  finite  being  along  with  us  in  the  world,  but  the 
absolute  spirit  in  whom  we  live  and  move  and  have  our 
being.  And  these  two  positions  are  not  left  merely 
standing  side  by  side.  The  thought  of  redemption  is 
their  reconciliation.  The  vital  nerve  of  history  is  the 
movement  and  process  of  the  redemption  of  the  world 
from  its  sin.  And  the  point  in  history  where  that  re- 
demptive process  at  once  comes  most  clearly  to  light, 
and  is  in  a  sense  eternally  accomplished — the  point,  that 
is  to  say,  where  the  true  nature  of  the  world,  the  true 
nature  of  its  whole  order  and  constitution,  is  most  fully 
revealed — is  the  Incarnation.  In  the  Incarnation,  the 
Son  of  God,  who  is  also  the  Son  of  man,  reveals  in 
Himself  the  union  of  the  divine  and  the  human  na- 
tures ;  and  by  that  revelation  he  shows  oneness  with 
God  to  be  within  the  possibilities  of  the  human  nature 
which  is  in  all  sons  of  men ;  so  that  in  Christ — the 
head  of  the  race  in  its  possibilities  toward  God,  as,  in 
Saint  Paul's  way  of  putting  it,  Adam  had  been  in  its 
possibilities  of  sin — the  unity,  in  affection  and  in  will, 


42      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

of  human  nature  with  God,  is  made  at  once  the  vision 
and  the  vocation  of  all  men.  Through  the  Incarnation 
man  is  revealed  to  himself  and  God  is  revealed  to 
man: — man  is  revealed  to  himself,  alike  in  the  horror 
of  his  sin,  and  in  the  possibilities  of  righteousness 
which  lie  within  his  divinely  created  nature ;  and  God 
is  revealed  to  man  in  the  reality  of  His  love,  and  of 
His  search  for  man;  and  thus  for  all  men  salvation  is 
brought  near. 

That,  then,  must  serve  to  remind  us  of  the  view  of 
the  world  which  is  contained  implicitly  in  our  religion, 
and  as  thus  contained  is  a  practically  effective  power, 
the  chief  of  the  creative  forces  that  work  in  history. 
But  when  the  theologian  has  brought,  so  far  as  he  can, 
his  religion  to  rational  consciousness  of  itself,  by  mak- 
ing explicit  the  fundamental  view  of  things  involved 
in  its  faith  and  practice,  he  finds  before  him — not, 
without  injustice  to  religion,  to  be  avoided — the  second 
of  his  tasks ;  the  task  of  relating  the  religion,  which 
thus  has  entered  into  conscious  possession  of  itself, 
to  our  whole  rational  consciousness  of  the  world.  In 
this  I  am  not  asserting  that  theology  is  either  a  good 
thing  or  a  bad  thing — it  has  been  both ;  I  am  saying 
that  if  it  is  to  exist,  this  is  what  it  must  do  before  it 
can  say  that  it  has  dealt  adequately  with  its  own  ob- 
ject. The  theologian,  having  attempted  to  bring  the 
principles  operative  practically  in  Christian  experience 
to  reflective  expression  of  themselves,  has  next  to  ask 
whether,  in  holding  and  practising  such  principles,  our 


THE  TASK  OF  THEOLOGY  43 

nature  as  at  once  religious  and  rational  is  at  unity  with 
itself. 

Let  me  emphasise  that  way  of  putting  it.  The  nature 
of  man  demands  a  unity  of  itself  through  all  its  essen- 
tial interests  and  activities;  such  unity  as  is  possible 
in  a  continually  developing  experience.  That  is  what  is 
meant  by  the  integrity  of  human  nature ;  the  integrity 
in  the  radical  absence  of  which  man  can  be  satisfied 
neither  with  his  rational  nor  with  his  religious  con- 
sciousness. Theology,  as  the  arising  and  operation  of 
this  demand  in  religious  men,  is  that  in  which,  so  far 
as  it  can  be  achieved,  religion  receives  its  rational  inter- 
pretation and  reason  finds  its  rest.  It  is,  in  the  true 
form  of  its  idea,  the  interpenetration,  at  the  highest 
level,  of  thought  and  life;  the  interpenetration  of  the 
life  which  is  religion,  with  the  systematic,  the  critical, 
the  philosophical  reason;  an  interpenetration  in  which 
each  is  an  object  to  the  other,  each  interprets  and  en- 
lightens the  other,  each  leads  the  other  toward  its 
fulfilment,  and  in  thus  fulfilling  the  other  fulfils  itself ; 
and  so,  in  a  mutual  understanding  and  organic  syn- 
thesis between  the  religious  consciousness  of  man  and 
his  rational  consciousness,  there  arises  a  true  unity  of 
human  experience — or  such  promise  and  beginning  of 
unity  as  is  possible  in  an  experience  which,  upon  the 
earth,  is  itself  only  a  beginning. 

The  question  about  religion  and  reason  is  really, 
then,  the  question  whether  our  whole  nature,  as  at  once 
religious  and  rational,  comes  in  Christian  experience  to 
its  unity  and  its  rest ;  the  rest  of  a  nature  whose  funda- 


44      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

mental  demands  have  in  their  integrity  been  satisfied, 
or  are  in  course  of  being  satisfied.  Such  a  question  is 
not  at  all  one  about  the  merely  external  reconciliation 
of  religion  and  reason,  so  that  each  can  recognise  toler- 
antly the  existence  of  the  other,  or  can  even  go  farther 
and  supply  to  the  other  an  artificial  and  alien  reinforce- 
ment. We  thoroughly  misapprehend  the  nature  of 
human  experience,  if  we  take  it  that  there  is  reason  on 
the  one  side  and  religion  on  the  other;  and  that 
the  total  man,  who  is  the  sum  of  the  two,  desires  as  a 
matter  of  the  integrity  of  his  being  to  establish  some 
modus  Vivendi,  some  terms  of  mutual  understanding 
and  agreement,  between  the  two  mutually  exclusive 
powers ;  arguing,  for  instance,  that  since  religion  is  an 
objective  consciousness — an  apprehension  of  God,  and 
the  animation  and  government  of  our  life  by  that  ap- 
prehension— religion  does  well  to  gain  from  reason  all 
the  enlightenment  that  reason  has  to  give  concerning 
the  objective  order  of  the  world.  Rather,  the  total 
man  is  religion ;  and  religion,  as  thus  the  total  man, 
must,  to  do  itself  justice,  take  reason  up  into  it,  and 
give  to  reason,  in  a  life  that  walks  with  reality,  all  the 
fulfilment  of  which  reason  is  capable.  Religion  means 
a  man  throwing  himself  (including  the  intellect  and  all 
its  search  for  truth)  into  a  life  organised  by  the  love  of 
God.  Religion  and  reason  are  such  that,  so  far  as  man 
fulfils  the  demands  of  his  nature,  he  seeks  at  once  to 
be  rational  in  his  religion  and  religious  in  his  reason. 
As  in  a  growing  experience  he  realises  and  possesses 
his  nature  in  the  integrity  of  its  interests,  he  more  and 


THE  TASK  OF  THEOLOGY  45 

more  feels  the  demand  for  that  unity  of  reason  and  reli- 
gion which  is,  in  its  lowest  terms,  a  unity  of  view ;  a 
unity,  a  reflexion  into  each  other,  of  the  view  of  the 
world  held  implicitly  in  religious  faith  and  practice,  and 
the  view  of  the  world  reached  explicitly  by  reason  fol- 
lowing its  own  interest  of  making  intelligible  the  facts 
of  experience.  So  that  when  religion  is  just  to  itself, 
its  attitude  to  reason  is  far  more  generous  and  con- 
structive than  is  involved  in  any  mere  demand  for  con- 
firmation or  refutation.  As  was  pointed  out  at  the 
beginning  of  the  lecture,  and  as  is  involved  in  what  has 
just  been  said,  religion  is  not  an  abstraction  from  the 
common  and  normal  interests  of  the  spirit  of  man.  It 
means  all  those  interests  brought  at  once  to  unity  and 
to  fulfilment  in  a  single  supreme  devotion.  It  means 
that  the  common  consciousness  of  man — the  conscious- 
ness which  expresses  itself  and  has  its  being  in  the  daily 
tasks  and  activities,  the  daily  enterprises  and  adven- 
tures, of  the  ordinary  life,  and  which  in  science  and 
literature  and  the  arts  does  but  more  completely  fulfil 
its  native  capabilities — brings  all  these  activities  and 
interests  to  their  concentration  and  inner  organic  unity, 
their  greatest  breadth  and  depth  and  height,  their 
greatest  intension  and  at  the  same  time  their  greatest 
extension,  in  the  love  of  God.  So  that  the  religious 
consciousness,  as  religious,  cannot  be  satisfied  with 
itself  unless  it  fulfil  and  realise  the  whole  nature  of 
man ;  unless,  that  is  to  say,  among  other  things,  it 
realise  and  fulfil  reason.  Religion,  as  religion,  desires 
to  be  that  in  which  reason  can  have  its  true  rest;  the 


46      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

rest  of  complete  development,  the  rest  of  coming  to 
its  full  stature,  the  rest  of  unity  with  its  object. 

And  if  the  demand  now  in  question  is  not  one  for 
the  merely  outward  relating  and  reconciling  of  reli- 
gion and  reason  to  each  other,  still  less  is  it  that  de- 
mand in  the  one-sided  form  too  often  met  with;  the 
form  in  which  primacy  is  ascribed  to  reason — reason 
taken  as  essentially  a  non-religious  principle — and 
it  is  required  that  in  the  eyes  of  such  reason,  religion 
vindicate  itself.  As  against  any  such  position,  it 
must  be  urged  that  the  theologian  is  unfaithful  to 
experience,  alike  as  in  the  individual  and  as  in  the 
history  of  the  race,  if  he  admits  any  way  of  stating 
his  task  which  suggests,  either  that  religion  has  no 
deep  foundations  of  life  in  itself  and  thus  is  not  self- 
vindicatory;  or  that  it  depends  on  speculative  reason 
for  its  vindication ;  or  that  its  great  value  lies  in  this, 
that  the  religious  consciousness  contains  implicitly 
(in  some  unscientific  picturate  form)  scientific  and 
philosophic  truth,  by  which,  when  it  is  brought  prop- 
erly to  light,  reason  can  profit — so  that  "the  truth  of 
religion"  is  something  which  comes  out  only  through 
the  interpretation  of  religion  into  terms  of  intellect. 
Such  a  view  misapprehends  not  only  the  nature  of 
religion;  it  misapprehends  just  as  seriously  the  gen- 
eral place  and  function  of  speculative  reason  in  our 
life  and  in  the  whole  development  of  our  conscious- 
ness. No  man  could  devise  a  more  radically  inade- 
quate account  of  the  genesis  and  growth  of  religion 
than  this :  that,  first,  man  made  to  himself  a  theology 


THE  TASK  OF  THEOLOGY  47 

or  philosophy — came  by  reflective  reasoning  to  a  behef 
in  God ;  then  set  himself  to  fashion  his  life,  in  worship 
and  in  conduct  generally,  into  accordance  with  that 
belief.  On  the  contrary,  man,  being  what  he  is,  lives 
his  life  with  a  wide  variety  of  activities  and  interests; 
the  practical  arts  from  the  most  rudimentary  to  the 
most  elaborate,  the  moralities,  the  religions  arise ;  and 
not  until  all  this  practical  organisation  of  experience 
has  gone  far,  not  until  man  has  created  for  himself 
some  sort  of  civilisation  with  a  moral  and  religious 
order,  does  he,  as  a  speculative  consciousness,  turn 
back  upon  himself  to  examine  these  the  elements  and 
activities  of  his  life.  But  when  that  return  upon  him- 
self is  made,  its  effect  may  indeed  be  profound ;  some- 
times in  radical  and  searching  revolution,  in  destruc- 
tive ferment  of  mind,  in  reversal  of  ancient  ways ;  but 
more  usually  in  the  gradual  introduction  of  a  deeper 
soul  of  rational  insight,  rational  hope,  rational  patience, 
into  those  perpetual  practical  activities  of  our  life. 
Hitherto  principles  have  operated  implicitly;  with  a 
power  like  that  of  nature,  but  often  confusedly,  in- 
consistently, with  injustice  to  themselves  and  perpetual 
unreconciled  conflict  with  one  another.  But  now  they 
are  brought  out  into  clear  light ;  are  enabled  on  the 
one  hand  to  possess  and  fulfil  themselves  more  ade- 
quately, on  the  other  hand  to  reconcile  and  unify  them- 
selves with  one  another.  And  more;  are  enabled  in 
some  measure  to  judge  themselves,  by  considering  their 
universal  and  eternal  relations;  their  relation  to  the 
fundamental   order  of  the   cosmos,   of   which   man's 


48      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

experience  is  itself  in  some  way  a  part,  and  of  whose 
supreme  principle  the  organising  and  operative  ideals 
of  man's  spirit  are  in  some  way  a  manifestation.  This 
reflective  return  of  the  spirit  of  man  upon  itself,  with 
the  conscious  interpenetration  of  life  and  reason  which 
thus  comes  to  be,  is  commonly  called  philosophy;  but 
when  the  spirit  which  thus  returns  upon  itself  is  reli- 
gious— when  life  means  to  it  the  heart's  apprehension 
of  the  supreme  principle  of  all  existence  and  the 
organisation  of  every  activity  in  and  through  that 
apprehension — the  return  is  theology. 

It  is  true  that  upon  philosophy,  still  more  upon 
theology,  in  this  conception  of  them,  there  are  the 
gravest  of  limitations.  In  our  incomplete  but  develop- 
ing life,  our  theology  must  have  in  it  something  pro- 
visional. Even  in  receiving  the  Logos  of  God,  we 
receive  Him  as  men  and  not  as  gods ;  receive  Him  not 
simply  into  frail  understandings,  but  into  spirits,  po- 
tentially infinite  it  may  be,  but  having  here  upon  the 
earth  only  the  beginnings  of  the  realisation  of  that 
potentiality.  So  that,  in  the  life  upon  the  earth,  the 
spirit  that  would  see,  the  spirit  that  would  apprehend 
reality  as  it  is,  must  always  be  criticising  and  recon- 
stituting its  view  of  the  world.  In  feeling,  and  in  the 
faith  which  is  feeling,  man  has  that  which  can  be  to 
him  at  once  his  deepest  spring  of  life  and  his  greatest 
practical  danger ;  a  sort  of  immediate  grasp  upon  the 
infinite  and  the  eternal,  prophetic  of  a  rational  appre- 
hension of  them  yet  to  be  realised.     But  all  that  we 


THE  TASK  OF  THEOLOGY  49 

can  here  hope  to  do,  in  the  way  of  such  rational  ap- 
prehension, is  to  form  an  hypothesis,  or  reach  a  point 
of  view  from  which  the  main  factors  of  our  expe- 
rience, the  main  features  and  characters  of  our  expe- 
rienced world,  are  seen  to  go  together  in  a  single  sys- 
tem ; — to  form  such  an  hypothesis,  and  then  leave  to 
the  departmental  sciences  the  work  of  carrying  as  far 
as  they  can,  from  their  own  special  and  abstract  points 
of  view,  the  rationalisation  of  particular  facts  and 
events.  A  view  of  the  world  in  which  each  empirical 
event  and  fact  would  be  seen  completely  rationalised — 
seen  in  the  total  or  eternal  system  of  its  relations,  seen 
in  its  complete  "divine  interpretation" — is  not  now 
open  to  us  men ;  it  is  not  given  in  revelation,  is  not  now 
possible  to  our  reason.  To  demand  such  a  view  is  to 
demand  what  cannot  be  had ;  to  condemn  theology  or 
philosophy  for  not  affording  it,  is  to  disdain  all  nightly 
help  of  lamps  and  candles  because  we  cannot  bring 
the  sun  and  moon  bodily  into  our  houses.  This  limi- 
tation upon  the  power  of  the  spirit  of  man  to  fulfil  its 
own  demand,  is  a  far-reaching  one.  It  makes  theology 
and  philosophy  to  be  as  much  prophetic  as  they  are 
scientific.    But  it  does  not  make  them  valueless. 

Upon  this  matter  of  the  difficulties  of  theology  I 
dwell  for  a  special  reason.  Doctrinal  Theology,  as  a 
systematic  discipline,  is  in  our  generation  very  dis- 
tinctly at  a  turning  point  in  its  course.  On  the  one 
hand  the  method  is  gone,  by  which,  a  generation  or 
two  ago,  systems  of  Doctrinal  Theology  were  still 
built  up;  the  method  of  loci  communes.    The  systems 


50      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

thus  built  up  were  by  no  means  without  power.  They 
had  in  them  an  immense  strength ;  the  strength  of  tra- 
ditionary wisdom  and  gathered  insight.  And  to  many 
of  those  who  took  that  method  as  a  thing  of  course — • 
no  more  to  be  doubted  than  the  ways  of  nature — the 
loci  communes  were  heads  of  genuine  insight  and  no 
mere  professional  formulae.  Such  men  really  under- 
took no  other  task  than  the  one  just  indicated.  They 
were  seeking  the  interpenetration  of  thought  and  life, 
of  religion  and  reason.  Under  whatever  burdens  of 
mechanical  order  and  arrangement,  they  were  really 
trying  to  relate  their  religious  experience,  and  the 
religious  experience  of  mankind,  to  their  total  con- 
sciousness of  the  world.  But  upon  that  method 
Doctrinal  Theology  stood  in  a  twofold  danger.  With 
its  established  and  conventional  order  of  topics,  it  ran 
the  risk  of  becoming  professional  and  mechanical; 
devitalised  by  loss  of  contact  with  actual  experience, 
and  yet  going  on  with  its  regular  motions  after  the 
life  had  departed.  Secondly,  the  method  made  at 
least  possible  a  fatally  easy  way  of  escaping  just  the 
difficulties  that  were  in  question  a  moment  ago.  The 
particular  doctrines  could  be  taken — often  were 
taken — one  by  one,  with  no  concern  for  a  genuine  and 
organic  unity  of  them.  Each  could  receive  its  own 
separate  discussion — nay,  its  own  separate  proof ;  a 
conclusion  in  one  of  the  separate  compartments  lay- 
ing no  obligation  upon  the  procedure  and  argument 
in  any  other.  But  in  this  a  change  has  come.  I  do 
not  mean  that  we  have  got  above  the  theological  weak- 


THE  TASK  OF  THEOLOGY  51 

ness  of  human  nature;  above  the  temptation  to  build 
our  theology  in  separate  pieces.  I  mean  that  we  are 
coming — already  have  come — to  a  different  drawing 
of  the  boundaries  within  theology;  to  a  different 
alignment  of  the  theological  disciplines  from  that 
which  the  older  Doctrinal  Theologians  had  before 
them.  On  the  one  hand,  and  first  in  the  order  of 
study,  we  have  a  vast  and  continually  increasing  ar- 
ray of  exegetical  and  historical  sciences,  which,  with- 
out dogmatic  bias,  seek  simply  for  truth  of  grammati- 
cal meaning  and  of  historical  fact.  On  the  other 
hand,  and  coming  later  in  the  order  of  study,  we  have 
what  we  were  wont  to  call  Doctrinal  Theology,  and 
what  we  were  wont  to  call  Apologetic,  fusing  them- 
selves together  as  a  philosophy  of  Christian  expe- 
rience. This  new  arrangement  of  boundaries — boun- 
daries, not  barriers — is  altogether  for  the  better.  It 
is  better  because  it  gives  us  the  true  and  concrete 
unity  and  differentiation  of  our  field,  instead  of  a 
series  of  conventional  distinctions.  And  it  is  better 
because  it  brings  the  doctrinal  theologian  inevitably 
face  to  face  with  the  genuine  problems  and  genuine 
difficulties  of  that  field.  That,  then,  is  one  side  of  the 
new  situation.  The  doctrinal  theologian  who  would 
make  his  theology  a  systematic  discipline  has  been 
brought  where  he  cannot  evade  the  intrinsic  difficulties 
of  his  subject :  he  must  face  life  as  it  actually  is — ■ 
life,  and  all  its  modern  scientific  account  of  itself. 
But  the  other  side  of  the  situation  is  this :  just  as 
doctrinal  theology  was  being  brought  to  this  point. 


52      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

there  has  come  upon  it  the  impact  of  another  ten- 
dency; a  tendency,  which  is  rooted  deep  in  the  whole 
modern  movement  of  life  and  science,  and  is  closely 
connected  with  the  greatest  recent  advances  in  the- 
ology. This  is  the  heroic  surgery  which  would  de- 
liver the  theologian  at  one  stroke  from  the  oppres- 
sion of  the  very  difficulties  here  in  question,  by  cut- 
ting off  systematic  theology  and  constructive  philoso- 
phy altogether,  and  confining  theology  to  the  special 
historical  and  literary  disciplines.  To  this  tendency 
one  sweeping  concession  must  be  made  from  the  out- 
set. Its  whole  positive  programme  is  sound.  To 
theology  the  departmental  studies  are  altogether  in- 
dispensable. The  modern  specialised  and  critical  pur- 
suit of  them  has  been  to  theology  a  veritable  new 
birth;  the  neglect  of  them  by  theology  spells  ruin, 
and  discreditable  ruin.  But  the  negative  side  can- 
not be  so  easily  admitted.  As  for  the  difficulties  that 
beset  philosophy  of  religion  and  systematic  theology, 
every  interest  both  of  truth  and  of  religion  requires 
us  to  see  that  the  difficulties  are  there,  and  that  they 
make  such  theology  and  philosophy  to  be  more  pro- 
phetic than  scientific.  But  that  is  not  enough.  We 
should  also  see  why  the  difficulties  are  there ;  and  to 
see  that,  is  to  recognise  that  we  must  face  them,  no 
matter  how  our  patience  be  tried,  and  do  the  best  we 
can  with  them.  The  difficulties  are  there  just  because 
theology  is  what  it  is ;  the  intellectual  correlate  of 
religion.  Religion,  as  was  earlier  pointed  out,  is  the 
whole  of  life  brought  to  unity  in  the  love  of  God; 


THE  TASK  OF  THEOLOGY  53 

is  the  all-inclusive  interest,  of  which  all  particular 
interests  and  objects  are  organic  parts;  something 
which  cannot  be  defined,  but  by  reference  to  which 
all  particular  values  are  defined.  Hence  any  theology 
that  could  attain  to  the  true  form  of  its  idea,  would 
be  a  thoroughly  articulated  view  of  the  system  of 
things  in  which  man  has  his  being  and  experience;  a 
thoroughly  articulated  view  of  the  complete  or  eternal 
order  of  the  world,  in  which  all  souls  have  their  being, 
all  events  their  significance,  and  God  His  realisation 
of  Himself  if  He  realise  Himself  at  all;  the  eternal 
order  whose  temporal  course,  as  the  church  in  its 
oecumenical  faith  believes,  is  gathered  to  its  centre 
in  that  revelation  of  God  which  is  the  Incarnation  of 
His  Son.  Any  theology,  I  say,  that  could  fulfil  the 
idea  of  theology,  would  be  such  a  completely  articu- 
lated view;  and  must  be,  in  whatever  beginnings  of 
it  are  possible  upon  the  earth,  the  promise  and  dawn- 
ing of  such  a  view  and  of  such  vision.  That  is  the 
reason  why  all  the  difficulties  which  besiege  us,  as  we 
try  to  make  our  experience  intelligible  to  ourselves, 
come  to  their  culmination  in  theology.  Theology  faces 
all  those  difficulties,  and  faces  them  in  their  intensest 
possible  form,  because  theology  deals  with  the  very 
realities  of  life,  the  things  that  no  man  can  renounce 
without  laying  aside  the  nature  of  humanity  and  the 
hopes  which  "make  us  men."  And  that  being  the  case, 
the  theologian  is  scarcely  true  to  his  task  as  the  inter- 
preter of  religion,  if  he  insist  upon  confining  theology 
to  special  investigations  of  history  and  literature ;  thus 


54      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

leaving  to  the  non-religious  intelligence  the  attempt 
to  gain  light  upon  those  questions  which  experience 
forces  upon  us,  and  which,  just  because  they  are 
questions  about  the  eternal  order  of  the  world,  and 
our  place  and  function  in  it,  are  questions  for  our 
common  life  and  for  the  religion  of  which,  even  in 
its  highest  forms,  our  common  life  is  still  the  scene. 
And  great  as  the  difificulties  are,  to  accept  the  task 
rather  than  to  deny  or  evade  it,  is  surely  the  true 
modesty.  It  is  the  nobility  of  the  mind  to  recognise 
how  weak  it  is  as  it  stands  in  its  infinite  field.  It  is 
its  ignobility  to  try  to  persuade  itself  that  the  greater 
part  of  that  field  is  not  its  field  at  all.  The  true  mod- 
esty of  the  intellect  is  magnanimous  and  high;  it 
comes  by  no  renunciation  of  the  labour  of  thought, 
by  no  self-chosen  penury  of  intelligence,  by  no  fi- 
nality of  submission  to  ghostly  counsellors.  It  lies  in 
taking  the  situation  as  it  is,  and  in  recognising  that 
though  our  whole  accomplishment  is  slight,  compared 
with  the  task,  yet  the  little  we  can  accomplish  is  great 
in  promise;  in  the  scanty  intellectual  achievement  of 
our  short  lives  and  partly  unfolded  minds,  there  is 
implied  an  eternal  whole  of  truth ;  as,  in  our  practical 
achievement,  a  society  which  is  the  eternal  whole  of 
good.  Indeed,  the  formal  unity  itself  of  our  mind,  as 
a  consciousness  at  once  religious  and  rational,  at  once 
practical  and  scientific,  stands  as  the  prophecy  of  a 
concrete  and  material  unity ;  an  absolute  or  eternal 
spiritual  unity  in  which  is  gathered  into  one,  and  rec- 
onciled,  all   the   strange   and   splendid  and  common- 


THE  TASK  OF  THEOLOGY  55 

place  and  tragic  content  of  the  world ;  and  in  which  the 
material  and  concrete  unity  of  the  warring  factors 
of  our  experience  is  progressively  possible.  Nay, 
there  is  a  sense  in  which  theology,  as  the  inter- 
penetration  of  religion  and  reason  just  spoken  of,  is 
already  actual  among  all  Christian  men ;  for  theology, 
upon  the  highest  conception  of  it  that  any  man  can 
form,  is  still  only  the  systematising  and  clarifying  of 
what  to  some  extent  goes  on  in  every  thoughtful  reli- 
gious man,  and  is  to  him  his  light  of  life.  In  our  at- 
tempt at  theology  and  philosophy  we  are  like  children 
who  stand  on  the  shore  of  the  infinite  sea,  and  en- 
deavour, with  eyes  that  can  look  only  a  little  way,  to 
penetrate  the  mysteries  of  the  central  and  untravelled 
deep;  yet  who  have,  in  the  very  nature  of  their  limi- 
tations, the  promise  of  the  overcoming  of  them.  The 
waves  and  the  tides  that  with  their  beauty  and  their 
strange  tragedies  break  upon  the  shore,  have  had  their 
birth  in  the  fundamental  laws  of  the  sea;  and  the 
spirit  that  has  its  dwelling  there,  where  the  waves 
and  the  tides  are — even  though  it  be  where  they  find 
their  limit  in  the  shore — already  has  in  it  kinship,  and 
the  promise  of  kinship,  with  what  seems  the  incom- 
municable deep. 

The  difficulties  of  theology,  in  a  word,  are  to  be 
striven  with,  not  yielded  to.  To  recognise  their  exist- 
ence and  their  weight,  is  honesty;  to  be  made  hope- 
less by  them  is  cowardice.  Coming  back,  then,  to  the 
main  matter  of  the  discussion,  we  must  say  once  more 


56      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

that  the  goal  of  theology  is  a  unity  of  religion  and 
reason.  The  belief  that  either  such  unity  itself,  or, 
what  is  more  likely,  a  perpetual  movement  toward  it, 
lies  within  the  possibilities  of  the  spirit  of  man,  is 
what  sets  the  theologian  at  work  and  keeps  him  at 
work.  And  in  allowing  himself  to  be  impelled  by  such 
a  faith,  he  does  well ;  for  he  sees — not  to  mention 
here  considerations  which  belong  to  a  later  discus- 
sion— that  some  measure  of  the  realisation  of  that 
unity  already  has  taken  place  in  the  spiritual  history 
of  man  upon  the  earth.  We  must,  then,  turn  to  the 
question  immediately  before  us :  the  view  of  the  world 
with  which  we  have  just  been  concerned  as  contained 
implicitly  in  Christian  experience — in  that  view  does 
reason  also  find  rest?  Not  that  reason  is  to  still  its 
unquiet,  by  analysing  the  Christian  consciousness,  find- 
ing a  view  of  the  world  therein,  and  accepting  that 
view  as  a  dogma  is  accepted.  Rather  what  I  shall 
argue  is  this,  that  so  far  as  reason  in  its  imperfect 
development  in  the  human  soul  can  satisfy  its  own 
demand — so  far  as  it  can  make  intelligible  to  itself  the 
many-sided  experience  of  labour  and  of  struggle  which 
is  the  history  of  mankind  and  which  comes  to  its 
highest  concentration  and  expression  in  our  conscious- 
ness of  God,  of  sin,  and  of  salvation — it  does  so  in  a 
view  of  the  world  essentially  the  same  as  that  which, 
in  however  unrationalised  and  undeveloped  a  form,  is 
implicit  in  the  practical  life  of  Christianity,  being 
gained  in  advance  of  clearly  conscious  reason  by  the 


THE  TASK  OF  THEOLOGY  57 

religious  consciousness  in  its  swifter  ascent  of  affec- 
tion and  of  faith. 

I  need  not  remind  you  that  in  attempting  to  deal 
with  this  in  the  remaining  three  lectures,  I  shall  be 
confined  to  the  briefest  of  outlines,  necessarily  omit- 
ting many  things,  and  having  Httle  scope  for  argu- 
ment of  attack  or  argument  of  defence.  Rather  let 
me  dwell  upon  this,  that  in  this  region  the  best  that 
any  man,  or  any  succession  of  men,  can  hope  to  do 
must  still  be  tentative.  To  the  end  of  our  earthly 
day,  all  our  theology  and  philosophy  must  have  much 
in  them  that  is  prophetic;  the  promise  of  science,  but 
not  yet  science.  So  that  the  view  of  which  I  have 
just  spoken  we  must  think  of  as  one  upon  which 
religion  and  reason  converge;  as  one,  in  the  practical 
and  intellectual  holding  of  which,  the  soul  of  man 
moves  with  hope — I  think,  with  good  hope — toward 
a  far-off  goal  of  unity  with  itself  and  with  the  whole 
of  existence. 

The  order  of  the  discussion  is  as  follows.  It  has 
to  set  out  from  experience;  and  experience  means  not 
some  abstract  conceptual  order,  nor  yet  abstract  sen- 
sations and  feelings  supposed  in  their  complexes  to 
constitute  individual  minds.  It  means  our  life  as  it 
now  actually  is;  what  we  have,  what  we  are,  and 
what  we  may  know  of  the  history  in  time  by  which 
we  have  come  to  be  what  we  are.  It  means  the  sights 
and  sounds,  colours  and  odours,  that  constitute  a  nat- 
ural world;  the  passions  and  the  reason  that  in  the 
unity  of  self-consciousness  are  the  natural  soul;  and 


58      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

all  the  activity  of  that  soul  in  the  common  labour  of 
life,  in  the  fine  and  the  practical  arts,  in  science  and 
morality  and  religion,  in  the  building  up  of  social 
and  political  order;  in  a  word,  all  that  process  of 
the  development  of  spiritual  capabilities  which  is  the 
history  of  civilisation  and  of  its  institutions.  I  shall 
first  have  to  lay  before  you  the  general  thesis  that  we 
can  best  make  intelligible  to  ourselves  the  experience 
which  is  thus  our  life,  by  viewing  it  as  an  activity  of 
reproduction  and  self-communication  on  the  part  of 
an  absolute  spirit.  That  is  to  say,  a  spirit  which  is  so 
organically,  so  creatively,  related  to  the  whole  system 
of  reality — to  the  whole  world  to  which  it  gives  origin 
and  in  which  it  continually  energises — that  its  con- 
sciousness of  itself  is  a  consciousness  of  the  whole 
(i.e.  the  eternal)  order  of  the  world  in  nature  and  his- 
tory. Or  rather,  let  me  say,  his  consciousness  of  him- 
self ;  for,  while  all  the  pronouns  have  misleading  as- 
sociations, personal  ones  certainly  mislead  less  than 
impersonal,  in  referring  to  an  absolute  spirit ;  a  spirit 
whose  self-determination  is  the  source  of  the  whole 
order  of  our  experienced  universe,  so  that  "all  our 
springs  are  in  him" ;  a  spirit  who  fulfils  himself  by 
imparting  himself,  and  in  the  impartation  communi- 
cates to  the  created  spirits  that  thus  come  to  be,  ideals 
of  truth,  of  beauty,  of  goodness,  which  in  the  abso- 
lute spirit  are  eternally  realised,  but  in  the  created 
spirits  operate  as  the  inner  springs  of  a  develop- 
ment which  only  gradually  and  through  many  strug- 
gles and  crises  becomes  clear  to  itself.    That  thesis — 


THE  TASK  OF  THEOLOGY  59 

no  new  one — I  must  set  before  you  to-morrow,  as 
a  general  account  of  the  making  of  man  and  the  mak- 
ing possible  of  his  experience;  and  then  must  attempt 
in  the  remaining  two  lectures,  further  to  articulate 
that  thesis  by  special  discussion  of  the  chief  factors 
in  the  structure  and  movement  of  our  experience ; 
factors  which  set  for  theology  its  real  loci  communes. 
The  large  factors  of  our  experience — the  great  mo- 
menta of  the  spiritual  process  which,  with  all  its  steady 
growth,  all  its  long  dialectic  of  opposed  forces,  all  its 
revolutions  and  new  births  of  time,  is  our  life  and 
history  upon  the  earth — fall  into  two  broad  classes ; 
classes  distinguishable  for  discussion,  inseparable  in 
experience.  On  the  one  hand,  there  is  "nature."  Na- 
ture, under  the  aspect  of  necessity,  surrounds  us;  not 
only  surrounds  us,  but  is  so  in  us,  that  its  breath  of 
life  is  in  some  sense  our  breath  of  life,  and  the  reve- 
lation of  its  being  given  by  the  special  sciences  a  reve- 
lation to  us  of  our  own  being.  On  the  other  hand,  there 
is  our  assertion  of  ourselves,  not  merely  in  the  pres- 
ence of  those  necessities  of  nature,  but  also  upon 
the  basis  of  them ;  an  assertion  by  which  the  soul  of 
man,  receiving  through  nature  and  its  necessities  the 
communication  of  spiritual  being,  comes  late  or  soon 
to  distinguish  itself  from  nature  and  from  those  ne- 
cessities. This  assertion  and  realisation  of  ourselves 
we  may  call  Freedom,  if  by  that  word  we  understand 
no  merely  abstract  and  indifferent  power  of  volition, 
but  the  concrete  realisation  by  the  spirit  of  man  of 
its  own  capabilities,  as  it  acts  out  its  own  inner  ener- 


60      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

gies  and  ideals  in  that  history  which  is  the  growth  of 
art  and  science,  of  morality  and  religion,  of  the  indus- 
trial and  social  and  political  order  of  civilisation.  But 
in  the  very  heart  of  the  activity  by  which  man  thus 
distinguishes  himself  from  nature  there  arises  the 
fact  which  fills  all  this  assertion  and  growth  of  our- 
selves with  tragedy:  the  fact  that  the  spirit  which 
has  life  in  itself  can  turn  to  its  own  way,  regarding  not 
the  purpose  and  vocation  of  God,  but  its  own  private 
will  and  pleasure;  so  that  freedom  becomes  sin,  and 
in  sin  nature  is  so  taken  up  that,  in  the  impulses  and 
instincts  of  man,  nature  appears  as  a  power  over 
against  its  maker,  God.  But  freedom,  and  sin,  and 
nature  in  man's  soul  rising  to  sin: — these  are  not  the 
ultimate  word.  The  world — this  very  world  of  na- 
ture and  freedom  and  sin — is  God's  world ;  in  it,  world 
of  freedom  and  of  sin  though  it  is.  He  has  to  fulfil 
Himself.  And  so  there  is  something  more  than  na- 
ture and  freedom  and  sin ;  and  in  the  experience  and 
history  of  mankind  that  something  more  is  the  cen- 
tral and  essential  thing  apart  from  which  neither 
nature,  nor  freedom,  nor  sin,  nor  the  life  of  man  in 
which  all  these  appear,  can  be  seen  in  its  true  being. 
That  something  more  is  that  the  whole  order  and 
constitution  of  the  world,  in  which  nature  and  free- 
dom, as  they  are  in  man,  come  to  be  sin,  is  also  an 
order  of  redemption ;  an  order  constituted  for  the 
overcoming  of  sin ;  not  through  external  compulsions 
as  such,  but  through  the  winning  of  man's  heart  by 
the  grace  of  God,  so  that  man,  in  communion  with 


THE  TASK  OF  THEOLOGY  61 

God,  in  dependence  upon  God,  dying  to  himself  in 
order  that  he  may  Hve  unto  God,  overcomes  sin  and 
makes  himself  in  the  activities  of  a  divinely  organised 
civilisation — his  City  of  God — more  and  more  at  one 
with  God.  But  with  this  idea  of  the  whole  divinely 
constituted  order  of  the  world  as  an  order  of  re- 
demption, we  are  brought  to  the  actual  movement 
of  that  redemptive  process  in  human  history ;  a  move- 
ment culminating  in  the  Incarnation.  And  with  that 
we  come  again  to  what  was  presupposed  in  setting  out ; 
the  historical  disciplines  of  theology.  We  began  with 
the  Christian  consciousness  as  present  fact;  those 
studies  deal  with  the  historical  sources  from  which, 
the  historical  process  through  which,  we  became  the 
subjects  and  bearers  of  that  consciousness.  But  as 
we  are  brought  back  at  the  end  to  those  studies,  it 
will  be,  I  trust,  to  see  them  in  some  wider  light,  through 
having  considered  the  universal  relations  in  which 
stand  the  experience  of  man  and  the  concentration  and 
summing  up  of  that  experience  in  a  consciousness  of 
sin  and  of  salvation. 

In  outlining  thus  the  task  and  the  problems  of  the 
theologian,  I  am  anxious  to  avoid  a  double  wrong; 
the  wrong  of  seeming  to  suggest  that  even  upon  the 
highest  view  of  it  the  theologian's  work  is  a  spiritual 
finality;  and  the  opposite  wrong  of  underestimating 
the  importance  of  theology  for  the  present  life,  the 
present  thoughts,  the  present  civilisation  of  men. 
On   the   one   hand,   there   are   times    when   theology 


62      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

should  be  silent;  times  when  love  and  faith  become 
one  indistinguishable  energy  of  the  soul,  and  rea- 
son is  fulfilled  in  intuition.  Then  the  inquiring, 
the  weighing,  the  searching — the  minute  and  pain- 
ful wringing  out  for  ourselves  of  hints  and  glimpses 
of  the  heavenly  light — have  no  more  place.  Not  that 
they  were  without  value ;  but  their  work  is  done ; 
in  a  higher  than  themselves  they  are  fulfilled.  On 
the  other  hand,  though  there  are  times  when  the- 
ology thus  passes  away  in  light;  and  though  these 
are  certainly  prophecies  in  us  of  a  mind  toward 
which  our  own  is  called  for  ever  to  approach,  a  mind 
for  which  eternally  theology  is  done  away  in  light; 
yet  in  such  a  life  as  ours  now  is — a  life  in  which  a 
thousand  infinite  forces  are  struggling  within  us, 
and  scarcely  by  our  utmost  eflforts  of  thought  and 
will  can  we  reconcile  them  and  bring  them  to  the 
unity  of  a  well-guided  life — theology  has  a  great  and 
splendid  function.  In  interpreting  religion  to  itself, 
it  is  the  interpreter  of  our  whole  life  to  itself.  And 
such  interpretation  means  not  only  the  overcoming 
of  the  civil  war  which  perpetually  is  breaking  out 
in  our  nature  between  the  practical  consciousness — 
the  moral  and  religious  mind — on  the  one  side,  and 
on  the  other  that  outlook  upon  the  whole  of  our 
life  to  which  the  scientific  mind  of  the  age  by  the 
very  completeness  of  its  success  continually  is  im- 
pelled. It  means  in  general  the  making  clear  to  us 
alike  of  the  mutual  harmony,  and  of  the  essential 
soundness,    of    all    the    great    rational    and    practical 


THE  TASK  OF  THEOLOGY  63 

factors  that  make  up  our  life;  and  thus  it  helps  to 
lead  us  to  that  desired  unity  of  experience  only  in 
which — as  a  unity  that  through  all  its  infinity  of 
details  is  centred  upon  God — does  either  religion  or 
reason  do  justice  to  its  own  principle  and  come  fully 
to  be  itself. 

That  is  really  the  question  of  the  bearing  of  the- 
ology upon  the  movement  of  civilisation ;  for  the 
true  unity  of  life  is  not  merely  individual  and  ab- 
stract, but  is  social  and  historical.  And  I  sometimes 
think  that  in  this  the  oecumenical  theology  has  still 
before  it  the  greatest  of  its  secular  labours.  By  mul- 
titudes outside  the  church  there  is  desired,  with  a 
passion  and  a  sense  of  wrong  of  which  we  within  the 
church  have  little  idea,  a  change  in  the  present  form 
of  our  civilisation ;  a  change  in  which  the  political 
order  of  our  life  would  be  absorbed  into  the  social 
and  industrial,  and  the  social  and  industrial  order 
itself  so  transformed  as  to  be  made  one  great  en- 
deavour to  realise  the  demands  of  the  "religion  of 
humanity."  The  important  question  is  not  whether 
that  change  will  take  place  or  no.  The  forces  that 
we  commonly  group  together  under  the  name  of 
social  evolution ;  forces  which  consist,  as  in  the 
determination  of  great  classes  not  to  sink  below 
a  reasonable  way  of  living,  so  also  in  the  public 
spirit,  the  good  sense,  the  temper  of  righteousness, 
which  know  themselves  defeated  so  long  as  any  part 
of  society  endures  wrong; — these  have  never  in  the 
past,  in  any  civilisation  such  as  ours,  left  society  in 


64      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

one  stay;  nor  will  they  in  the  future.  The  important 
question  is  not  whether  there  will  be  change  or  no, 
but  in  what  spirit  it  will  be  effected.  To  individ- 
uals and  to  single  generations,  the  forces  of  social 
evolution  present  themselves  as  impersonal  and  fa- 
tal. It  is  a  little  thing  that  they  render  forecast  diffi- 
cult, and  continually  set  aside  our  paper  constitu- 
tions. Nolentem  trahunt;  they  make  of  the  individ- 
ual what  he  would  not  be.  Yet  they  are  not  really 
impersonal,  nor  altogether  fatal ;  even  in  the  move- 
ment of  its  social  order  the  race  can  "half  control  its 
doom."  And  the  truly  important  question — the  ques- 
tion of  a  standing  or  falling  civilisation — is  how  in  the 
shaping  of  industrial  and  social  order  that  control 
will  be  exercised ;  whether  the  men  and  women  who 
do  the  world's  task-work  will  so  take  the  matter  into 
their  own  hands  as  to  work  out,  independently  of 
Christianity  and  with  indifference  to  it,  their  own 
social  salvation ;  or  whether,  as  they  work  out  that 
salvation — for  none  but  themselves  can  work  it  out — 
Christianity  will  be  in  the  midst  of  the  movement, 
making  that  religion  of  humanity  and  the  civilisation 
based  upon  it,  deep  enough  to  be  true  to  reality  and 
true  to  the  nature  of  man ;  doing  that  by  bringing  it 
home  to  men's  hearts  that  all  human  relations  are 
relations  to  God,  so  that  wrong  against  any  man  is 
wrong  against  God,  and  the  true  religion  of  humanity 
is  the  social  union  of  mankind  in  the  love  of  God ; 
the  social  union  of  mankind  in  a  Kingdom  of  God 
which  includes  the  whole  life  and  work  of  humanity 


THE  TASK  OF  THEOLOGY  65 

on  the  earth,  and  in  which,  as  there  is  no  uncleanness 
of  individual  Hfe,  so  is  there  no  pubHc  wrong,  no 
social  cruelty,  no  industrial  oppression,  but  an  open 
way  for  each  into  the  best  that  is  known  by  all.  That 
vast  function  of  being  the  inspiration  of  humanity  in 
its  evolution  of  its  social  and  industrial  order,  is, 
indeed,  a  matter  of  religion  rather  than  of  theology. 
Yet  theology  has  a  place  in  it;  for  in  theology  is  an 
appeal  of  religion  to  the  whole  rational  spirit  of  man. 
Certainly  to  the  life  of  the  men  who  are  to  follow  us, 
whatever  the  form  of  it  may  prove  to  be,  those  men 
contribute  who  to-day  do  what  they  can  to  apprehend 
the  life  which  the  oecumenical  theology  sought  to 
express,  and  the  person  whom  it  sought  to  interpret; 
and  who  thus  bring  home  to  the  heart  and  to  the 
mind  of  the  age,  not  ancient  symbols  alone,  but  an 
intelligible,  a  vital,  an  enduring  and  deepening  gospel 
of  inner  devotion  and  of  social  life. 

The  value  of  theology,  then,  lies  in  this,  that  when 
life  and  understanding  go  hand  in  hand,  understand- 
ing, if  it  have  any  soul  of  wisdom,  can  help  greatly 
in  clarifying  and  deepening  life.  Sometimes  it  can 
help  in  what  properly  is  the  task  of  the  plain  good 
sense  of  the  working  day;  in  removing  particular  ob- 
stacles from  before  our  feet.  But  its  greater  help 
is  to  give  vision  to  our  eyes,  and  to  summon  up  for 
us  the  wider  horizons  that  really  determine  the  mean- 
ing of  the  point  at  which  we  now  stand.  And  in  this 
function — this  function  of  interpreting  to  us  our  own 
experience   and  helping  us  toward  the  true  organi- 


66      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

sation  and  unity  of  the  manifold  and  apparently  con- 
flicting forces  that  are  for  ever  at  work  in  it — broadly 
and  ultimately  theology  must  succeed.  For  life  and 
thought  flow  together — flow  as  one — from  the  same 
divine  fountain.  But  completely  it  can  never  succeed ; 
in  the  spirit  of  man,  developed  as  it  is  by  the  gradual 
self-communication  of  a  divine  principle,  life  always 
outruns  thought;  no  man  can  ever  bring  for  himself 
his  complete  being — the  race  of  men  can  never  bring 
for  itself  its  complete  being— to  consciousness. 

Yet  is  is  more  important  to  dwell  upon  the  nature 
of  theology  than  upon  its  limitations ;  for  once  its 
nature  as  interpreting  and  therefore  as  presupposing 
religion  is  apprehended,  its  power  and  its  limitations, 
its  use  and  its  danger,  follow  at  a  glance.  Its  fabric 
rises  in  the  outer  court,  the  court  of  the  understanding ; 
yet,  so  far  as  it  is  faithful  to  its  task,  it  is  from  the 
inner  court  that  it  is  organised  and  built.  Or  rather, 
that  inner  court  has  no  boundary.  Wherever,  through  all 
the  troubled  ways  of  this  world,  God  dawns  on  men, 
and  men  "come  to  themselves" ; — there  is  the  inner 
court,  and  in  it  as  in  a  place  of  light  all  who  have 
chosen  God  are  together;  the  saints,  the  prophets,  the 
mystics,  all  the  pure  in  heart ;  all  who,  however  dimly, 
through  whatever  cloud  of  mind  or  under  whatever 
oppression  of  labour,  have  apprehended  a  love  that 
moves  "the  sun  and  the  other  stars,"  and  upon  it  as 
upon  an  only  and  yet  an  all-suflicient  hope,  have  cast 
themselves.  There,  where  all  things  are  in  light,  and 
the  light  is  God,  and  knowledge  is  with  life,  and  life 


THE  TASK  OF  THEOLOGY  67 

with  knowledge,  made  one — there  is  the  fulfilment  and 
the  inspiration  of  every  true  human  labour  or  attempt 
at  labour ;  and  unless  theology  is  rooted  there,  it  has 
no  living  root  at  all.  And  when  it  is  not  rooted  there ; 
when  it  becomes  mere  learning,  forgetful  that  religion 
is  life — a  life  which  takes  in  all  the  hopes  and  energies 
of  mankind — and  theology  the  attempt  of  that  life  to 
understand  itself ;  then  it  loses  the  one  character  that 
makes  any  human  work  worth  doing,  the  character  of 
helping  the  world  toward  a  unity  of  all  its  forces  in 
the  love  of  God.  In  theology,  indeed,  the  highest  and 
the  lowest  that  are  in  man  come  to  light.  The 
highest;  for  theology  is  the  interpretation  of  the 
highest  of  all  things — the  faith  in  God  which,  just 
because  it  knows  and  loves  God,  welcomes  all  truth. 
But  also  the  lowest ;  the  issues  are  great,  and  our 
human  nature  can  be  small,  and  so  it  is  that  faith 
breaks  down  into  fear ;  and  with  fear  comes  hate ; 
and  fear  and  hate  issue  in  cruelty — even  though  it 
be  the  cruelty  that  imagines  it  does  God  service. 
And  alike  in  the  theology  which  is  mere  learning,  and 
in  that  which  is  fear  grown  articulate,  there  arises 
a  mortal  wrong  of  man,  the  tyranny  which,  if  it  has 
oppressed  science,  has  oppressed  religion  still  more ; 
the  tyranny  of  creeds  that  are  external  to  religion 
and  have  in  them  nothing  of  its  free  breath  of  life. 
So  that  those  who  have  no  escape  from  the  questions 
of  theology  and  from  the  attempt  to  gain  light  upon 
them,  have  had  often  enough  to  bear  in  their  hearts 
the  echo  of  the  ancient  lament :  Multiim  incola  fuit 


68      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

anima  mea.  But  that  is  a  possibility  which  has  to  be 
faced  in  every  great  work  of  the  spirit  of  man.  There 
is  no  vocation  of  man,  but  it  may  be  made  an  evil  to 
humanity;  and  it  is  as  we  draw  near  to  the  throne 
itself  of  God  that  the  best  things  are  by  our  human 
unworthiness  made  the  worst.  Nor  is  that  an  an- 
cient story;  every  age  learns  it  anew.  Few  things, 
for  instance,  have  been  better  in  our  day  than  the 
historical  and  critical  study  which  has  made  the  Old 
Testament  to  our  consciences  a  vivid,  a  searching,  a 
commandingly  practical  book.  But  often  that  open 
way  to  a  great  companionship  in  the  better  and 
braver  things  of  life  is  turned  into  evil,  when  the  haste 
of  our  age  is  upon  us,  and  from  our  pulpits  we  lay 
our  unmastered  shreds  of  criticism,  or  our  undiscrimi- 
nating  anger  against  it,  upon  a  simple  and  hard-work- 
ing people  whose  one  need  is  to  be  brought  near  to 
the  love  and  the  perpetual  consolation  of  God.  From 
such  preaching,  still  more  from  all  that  spirit  of  the 
age  of  which  such  preaching  is  the  symbol — the  haste 
of  life,  the  confusion,  the  failure  to  live  with  deep  and 
elementary  things — one  passes  with  relief  to  the  older 
worship  which  depends  on  no  man's  gifts,  but  is  of 
itself  august  in  majesty,  august  in  comfort;  Psalm, 
and  the  immemorial  common  prayer  bringing  before 
God  the  need  and  the  hope  of  us  all ;  and  at  last,  when 
the  day  and  its  work  are  ours  no  longer,  the  plainsong 
of  Te  liicis  ante,  binding  together  in  the  associations  of 
its  austere  and  secular  music  the  ages  in  which  the 
church  kept  her  watch,  while  our  stubborn  fathers,  half 


THE  TASK  OF  THEOLOGY  69 

in  obedience  to  the  heavenly  vision,  half  in  the  natural 
forces  of  their  life,  laid  the  foundations  of  the  mingled 
and  tragic  structure  which  is  now  our  civilisation. 

It  is  good  to  rest  there  with  memory  and  with 
peace.  Yet  with  such  memory  and  such  peace  no 
man  may  continually  abide.  Presently  where  the  voice 
of  confession  was,  and  that  solemn  music,  there  is  si- 
lence; and  from  the  temple  one  must  pass  to  the  city 
and  the  fields.  There  it  is — in  the  place  where  men  la- 
bour for  their  bread,  the  place  where  their  critical 
and  revolutionary  sciences  rise,  the  place  where  slowly 
they  shape  their  civilisation — that  the  theologian,  him- 
self one  of  them  and  doing  all  he  does  as  part  of  the 
common  task,  must  do  his  own  day's  work ;  seeking 
as  he  can  for  a  unity  of  those  many  thoughts  and 
many  insights ;  and  keeping  alive  in  the  place  of  man's 
science  a  prophecy  of  the  intuition  and  the  love  in 
which  all  effort  after  science  and  after  goodness  is  to 
be  fulfilled;  the  intuition  wherein,  in  the  knowledge 
of  God,  all  things  are  known;  the  love  in  which  every 
man's  deed  is  in  its  measure  a  fulfilment  of  all  men, 
and  as  a  fulfilment  of  all  men  a  fulfilment  of  God. 
And  unless  God  is  there,  in  that  common  field  where 
we  do  our  daily  work  of  hands  and  of  mind — unless 
He  is  there,  seeking  men  and  of  men  to  be  found — 
neither  was  He  in  the  temple. 


II 

Human  Experience  and  the  Absolute  Spirit 

Yesterday  I  attempted  to  indicate  the  task  of  the 
theologian ;  a  task  rooted  in  the  common  conscious- 
ness of  rehgious  men,  in  the  sense  that  it  is  the  en- 
deavour to  perform  more  systematically  and  thor- 
oughly that  work  of  reflexion  to  which  they  inevi- 
tably, and  by  the  inner  nature  of  religion  itself,  are 
forced,  but  which  ordinarily  they  can  accompish  only 
in  ways  unsystematic,  fragmentary,  prophetic.  First, 
the  theologian — remembering  once  more  that  that  name 
properly  signifies  not  this  or  that  particular  man,  but 
the  Christian  consciousness  grown  reflective  and 
undertaking  through  long  histories  and  in  countless 
individual  minds  a  task  which  in  this  world  can  at  the 
best  be  accomplished  only  in  part — the  theologian 
has  to  bring  to  explicit  form  the  beliefs  that  in 
the  affections  and  energies  of  Christian  experience 
act  as  the  organising  powers  of  our  life  and  of 
all  that  is  best  in  our  civilisation ;  so  that  in  his  work 
the  Christian  consciousness  enters  somewhat  more 
systematically  into  the  intellectual  possession  of  its 
own  nature  and  content.  Secondly,  he  has  to  con- 
tribute what  he  can  to  the  ancient  and  enormously 
difficult  task  of  attempting  to  set  the  religious  con- 
sciousness, thus  made  explicit,  in  relation  to  our  whole 
rational  consciousness  of  reality.     And  in  both  stages 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT  71 

of  his  task  he  has  to  deal  with  a  consciousness  which 
is  more  than  merely  individual.  He  has  to  deal  with 
the  religious  consciousness,  not  only  as  an  individual 
Christian  man  entering  into  his  own  heart  and  con- 
sidering its  controlling  devotions,  but  also  as  the 
student  of  a  history  and  a  literature  which  stand  cen- 
tral to  the  world's  life,  and  by  which  his  own  indi- 
vidual experience  has  been  rendered  possible.  And 
the  rational  consciousness  of  reality  with  which  he  is 
concerned,  is  not  simply  his  own  private  thought 
about  the  world,  but  (in  whatever  extent  he  can  en- 
ter upon  it)  the  whole  human  consciousness  of  reality 
as  thus  far  registered  in  our  inherited  common  sense 
of  things,  in  science,  and  in  philosophy.  The  object 
of  thus  trying  to  set  the  religious  consciousness  in  re- 
lation to  our  whole  rational  consciousness  of  reality, 
was  not  to  "prove"  religion  by  travelling  beyond  it 
to  some  external  confirming  power ;  for  there  is  noth- 
ing external  to  it ;  but  rather  to  do  justice  to  both  re- 
ligion and  reason  by  asking  whether  human  nature 
is  at  one  with  itself  as  the  bearer  of  both.  It  is  true 
that  in  such  a  life  as  ours — an  experience  still  in  course 
of  development — theology  can,  in  such  an  attempt, 
take  only  the  first  steps  of  a  long  journey;  in  such 
a  life,  neither  on  the  one  hand  can  any  practical  atti- 
tude bring  its  operative  principles  wholly  to  clear  con- 
sciousness; nor  on  the  other  hand  has  the  rational 
consciousness  done  itself  more  than  the  beginnings 
of  justice.  But  that  is  no  ground  for  refusing  to  be 
theological  at  all;  no  ground  for  refusing  to  attempt 


72      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

the  satisfaction  of  a  demand  which  human  nature 
keenly  feels;  no  ground  for  refusing  to  look  at  all 
for  a  unity  of  religion  and  reason.  We  have  a  vision 
of  the  goal;  and  some  steps  have  already  been  taken 
toward  it.  As  was  indicated  yesterday,  such  the- 
ology has  to  some  extent  long  been  actual  among 
men;  in  the  men  who  most  completely  fulfil  human 
nature  in  Christianity,  there  has  been  at  least  a  con- 
vergence of  religion  and  reason  upon  a  common  view 
of  the  world ;  reason  itself  finding  rest — so  far  as  in 
our  life  such  a  thing  is  possible — in  the  view,  which 
as  implicit  in  Christian  love  and  faith  has  already 
been  in  outline  before  us,  but  which,  as  an  hypothesis 
of  reason  for  making  intelligible  to  ourselves  the  main 
characters  of  our  experience,  may  be  roughly  summed 
up  in  some  such  way  as  this.  (1)  The  experience 
which  is  our  life  and  history  upon  the  earth  is  a 
process — or  part  of  a  process — in  which  a  supreme 
God,  an  absolute  spirit,  realises  Himself  by  repro- 
ducing Himself,  under  limitations,  in  and  as  lesser 
spirits.  (2)  The  lesser  spirits  who  have  their  origin 
and  their  being  through  such  a  self-communication 
on  the  part  of  God,  must  late  or  soon  come  to  be  free, 
if  God  is  to  have  in  them  any  worthy  fulfilment  of 
Himself ;  however  gradually,  through  whatever  media 
of  physical  and  natural  histories,  and  in  whatever 
empirical  content  of  practice,  that  freedom  be  real- 
ised. (3)  In  such  freedom  of  man  sin  is  at  least  an 
abstract  possibility.  (4)  When  the  desperate  prob- 
lem  arises  that   sin   is   not  merely   such  an   abstract 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT  73 

possibility;  that  on  the  contrary  the  order  of  our  life, 
in  which  the  individual  will  of  man  is  developed 
is  such  that  the  adult  will  is  not  merely  capable 
of  sin,  but  has  a  positive  bent  toward  sin,  a 
natural  or  original  sin : — when  this  desperate  prob- 
lem arises,  it  is  met  by  what,  both  for  Christian  faith 
and  for  reason,  is  the  great  reconciling  and  solving 
idea,  the  idea  that  the  whole  order  of  the  world  is  in 
its  inner  nature  a  process  of  redemption,  a  process 
of  the  overcoming  of  sin ;  a  redemption  which  is 
brought  to  light  for  us  men  in  the  incarnation  of  the 
Son  of  God,  in  whom  all  things  are  created  and  in 
whom  the  universe  holds  together.  So  that  the  rea- 
son of  man  finds  the  solution  of  its  ultimate  problem 
in  a  religious — a  Christian — idea.  By  means  of  that 
idea  it  is  able,  I  will  not  say  to  achieve,  but  to  move 
with  good  hope  toward,  its  goal :  an  apprehension  of 
the  meaning  of  our  life,  through  an  insight  into  the 
order  of  the  world  and  into  the  place  and  function 
of  man  in  that  order. 

With  that  view  of  the  world,  as  the  apprehension 
of  reality  implicit,  and  implicitly  operative,  in  Chris- 
tian love  and  faith,  we  were  concerned  in  the  first 
lecture;  with  it,  as  satisfying  the  demand  of  reason 
that  our  experience  be  made  intelligible  to  us,  we  are 
to  be  concerned  in  the  three  lectures  that  remain. 
In  the  present  lecture  I  have  to  deal,  then,  with  the 
first  of  the  topics  noted  at  the  close  of  the  lecture 
yesterday,  and  roughly  summed  up  a  moment  ago : 
the  view  that  we  can  best  make  intelligible  to  our- 


74      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

selves  the  experience  which  is  our  hfe  and  history 
upon  the  earth  by  regarding  it  as  a  process  in  which 
an  absolute  spirit  realises  himself  by  reproducing 
himself  in  lesser  spirits;  a  reproduction  of  himself 
in  which  he  makes  the  spirit  of  man  more  and  more 
capable  of  apprehending  and  constructing  a  world, 
and  more  and  more  communicates  the  world — the 
world  of  which  we  ourselves  are  organic  parts — to 
the  spirits  that  thus  are  being  made  more  and  more 
capable  of  apprehending  it.  By  reference  to  God,  as 
such  an  absolute  spirit,  gradually  reproducing  Him- 
self, through  processes  which  we  call  "nature,"  in 
and  as  the  soul  of  man,  we  can  make  intelligible  to 
ourselves  the  life  which  is  our  experience  upon  the 
earth ;  can  make  intelligible  to  ourselves  our  self- 
contained  and  yet  infinitely  related  individuality,  our 
dependence  and  yet  our  freedom ;  can  make  intelli- 
gible to  ourselves  our  experience  of  nature,  of  nat- 
ural passions,  and  of  the  regulation  and  reconstitution 
of  these  in  accordance  with  moral  ideas  and  religious 
devotion. 

The  considerations  which  lead  to  such  a  view  are, 
in  the  main,  elementary  and  obvious,  and  received  long 
ago  in  human  thought  their  pointed  and  impressive 
statement.  They  come  briefly  to  this.  In  the  first 
place,  our  life  is  a  development  of  spiritual  capabilities ; 
and  such  a  development  in  the  true  sense  of  the  term ; 
that  is,  a  process  in  which  the  growth  takes  place,  not 
by   mere   increments    from   without,   but   by   the   co- 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT  75 

operation  of  a  life  within  with  the  system  of  a  "world 
without" — the  outer  world  thus  becoming  the  means 
of  realisation  to  the  inner  life.  But  in  the  second 
place,  since  development  cannot  arise  out  of  a  void — 
ex  nihilo,  nihil — such  a  process  of  the  gradual  realisa- 
tion of  spiritual  capabilities  implies,  as  its  prius,  an 
eternal  and  absolute  spirit  who,  as  part  of  the  one 
activity  which  is  his  fulfilment  of  himself,  commu- 
nicates or  reproduces  himself  in  and  as  the  soul  of 
man,  and  constitutes  that  "world  without"  in  whose 
history  man  has  his  place  and  enters  upon  his  being, 
so  that  its  natural  forces  are  divine  media  in  the  mak- 
ing of  man. 

The  former  of  those  points  is  a  statement  of  fact. 
Our  experience,  whether  as  in  the  individual  or  as  in 
the  race,  so  far  from  being  either  self-created  or  com- 
plete once  and  for  all,  begins  as  potentiality;  as  some- 
thing which  may  indeed  be  the  promise  of  all  things, 
but  in  actual  present  reality  is  only  one  step  above 
sheer  nothingness.  Gradually  the  potentiality  becomes 
actuality;  the  actuality  which  is  labour  and  knowl- 
edge, art  and  science,  morality  and  religion — the  life 
of  the  citizen  not  only  in  a  political  society  upon  the 
earth,  but  also  in  an  invisible  kingdom  where  the  ser- 
vice is  of  ideals  that  cannot  be  written,  but  in 
proportion  as  they  are  realised  pass  on  in  vision 
before  us.  All  this  realisation  of  spiritual  capabilities 
forms  a  genuine  process  of  development ;  takes  place, 
as  was  said  a  moment  ago,  not  by  mere  increment  of 
being  from  without,  mere  laying  of  additional  reality 


76      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

upon  a  passive  subject  which  thus  is  not  a  true  indi- 
vidual at  all ;  but  by  a  process  of  growth  from  within, 
in  which  a  rich  and  systematic  content  of  being,  present 
implicitly  from  the  beginning,  is  gradually,  by  the 
energies  of  an  individual  life  within  working  in  unison 
or  even  in  apparent  conflict  with  the  energies  of  the 
system  without,  made  explicit.  Upon  that  inner  char- 
acter of  the  development,  however,  it  will  presently  be 
necessary  to  dwell  at  some  length ;  here  let  me  keep  to 
its  broad  outline.  Our  life,  I  said,  begins  as  poten- 
tiality. The  infant  child — behind  it  already,  if  scien- 
tific eyes  read  with  any  correctness  the  evidence  of  the 
structures  in  its  tiny  frame,  a  long  development  in 
which,  from  the  dust  of  the  ground,  the  way  has  been 
prepared  for  the  spiritual  history  which  henceforth  is 
to  be  its  life — the  infant  child  shows  at  first  little  sign 
of  intelligence,  little  sign  of  conscience,  little  sign  of 
the  powers  that  in  other  human  individuals  have  been 
making,  and  in  it  are  to  continue  to  make,  a  world  and 
the  civilisation  of  a  world.  But  soon — as  though  a 
work  of  continuous  spiritual  creation  were  going  on — 
there  appear  in  its  face  signs  of  the  recognition  of  per- 
sons, signs  of  interest  in  things.  Gradually  the  little 
being  that  has  had  an  animal  growth,  and  by  that 
growth  is  linked  into  the  whole  seonian  course  of  the 
world's  natural  history,  enters  for  itself  upon  a  history 
in  which  it  shows  itself  to  have  been,  always  and  im- 
measurably, more  than  an  animal ;  shows  itself  to  be  a 
part  or  product  of  a  world  whose  principles  are  im- 
measurably more  than  biological.     In  that  history  it 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT  77 

realises  for  itself  and  in  itself,  by  actual  achievement, 
its  own  continually  increasing  measure  of  those  appar- 
ently infinite  capabilities  of  the  spirit  of  man  to  which 
reference  has  just  been  made:  the  capability  of  science, 
of  the  fine  and  the  practical  arts ;  the  capability  of 
moral  judgment  and  action,  of  social  and  civil  life;  the 
capability  of  religion.  As  it  realises  these  capabilities 
— that  is  to  say,  as  it  gradually  becomes  itself,  grad- 
ually enters  into  possession  of  its  own  nature  and  of 
its  world — it  becomes  a  consciousness  at  once  intensely 
individual  and  altogether  social.  It  comes  to  be  indi- 
vidual in  the  sense  that  each  of  us  possesses  himself 
as  an  immediate  and  in  that  way  an  incommunicable 
life;  an  incommunicable  life,  with  a  specific  character 
and  temperament  of  its  own,  with  a  sense  of  respon- 
sibility for  actions  of  which  it  itself  and  not  another 
is  the  source,  and  with  an  unshareable  feeling  of  self- 
identity  running  through  all  its  growth  and  change  and 
variety.  It  comes  to  be  social,  in  the  sense  that  each 
of  us  thus  possesses  himself  and  has  his  individual  and 
incommunicable  being,  in  an  order  in  which  human 
beings  have  made  themselves  human  by  living  with 
one  another  in  the  energies  and  charities  of  that  com- 
mon life  in  which  there  has  come  to  be  a  history  of 
civilisation,  articulated  in  work  and  play,  in  customs 
and  institutions,  in  the  intellectual  and  practical  mas- 
tery over  nature  through  science  and  the  arts,  in  the 
hopes  and  visions  wherein  the  spirit  of  to-morrow 
fights  with  growing  forces  its  irregular  battle  upon 
the  field  of  to-day. 


78      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

Thus  it  is  that  human  nature  begins  to  be;  as  the 
potentiahty  of  such  spiritual  achievements  and  struc- 
tures. Human  experience,  in  the  individuals  and  races 
and  histories  in  which  the  soul  of  man  has  been  able 
to  do  any  sort  of  justice  to  itself,  means  the  realising 
of  that  potentiality.  This  is  a  first  and  altogether  ob- 
vious fact  about  our  experience.  But  our  very  famil- 
iarity with  it  makes  us  fail  to  see  the  wonder  of  it; 
makes  us  fail  to  apprehend  the  profound  and  difficult 
problem  involved  in  it.  Development  does  not  come 
out  of  nothing;  ex  nihilo,  nihil.  We  talk  easily  about 
potentialities;  but  what  is  a  potentiality?  It  is  cer- 
tainly not  something  that  exists  in  its  own  right,  and, 
as  thus  existing,  is  the  source  of  lines  of  widening  and 
ascending  existence.  Rather,  when  there  is  a  move- 
ment from  potential  to  actual,  a  process  of  bringing 
the  implicit  to  explicitness,  there  must  be  something 
at  work  which  already  at  the  beginning  is  adequate 
to  the  production  of  the  whole  process  from  begin- 
ning to  end.  We  cannot  conceive  a  process  of  develop- 
ment as  beginning  out  of  nothing;  nor  can  we  con- 
ceive the  subject  of  the  development  as  receiving  from 
nothing  those  continual  increments  of  being,  which,  as 
organically  fulfilling  the  being  already  there,  are  pre- 
cisely what  we  mean  when  we  speak  of  development. 
In  a  word,  what  we  have  on  our  hands  is  the  question 
of  the  Aristotelian  metaphysic :  what  is  the  adequate 
source,  or  sufficient  reason,  of  development? 

To  that  Aristotelian  question  we  must,  I  think, 
return  Aristotle's  answer:  the  principle  of  the  neces- 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT  79 

sary  priority  of  Actuality  to  Potentiality  in  any  pro- 
cess of  development.  In  any  particular  case  of  devel- 
opment, there  must  be  operative  throughout  the  whole 
process  a  principle  adequate  to  the  production,  by  this 
gradual  method,  of  the  actuality  which  is  the  end  of 
the  process.  Else  the  movement  from  potentiality  to 
actuality  could  not  take  place  at  all;  there  would  be 
no  sufficient  reason,  no  adequate  source,  of  the  con- 
tinual increase  of  reality  in  the  individual,  but  not 
self-caused,  subject  of  the  development.  And  if  the 
development  in  question  is  the  whole  temporal  move- 
ment of  cosmic  reality,  the  principle  involved  must  be 
a  principle  eternal  and  absolute;  absolute  as  requiring 
for  its  existence  no  other  activity  than  its  own ;  eter- 
nal as  by  that  activity  making  possible,  and  in  that 
sense  including,  the  whole  concrete  content  of  the 
temporal  movement  of  the  world. 

Such  an  absolute  principle,  or  unmoved  mover, 
Aristotle  considered  himself  to  find  in  pure  thought 
as  a  supreme  individual ;  that  is,  in  God  viewed  as 
absolute  reason — a  reason  which  has  not  to  go  beyond 
itself  for  its  object,  but  is  altogether  its  own  object. 
This  conception,  however,  Aristotle  was  driven  to  work 
out  in  such  a  way  as  almost  to  destroy  the  value  of 
the  insight  concerning  development  with  which  he 
started;  was  driven  to  this  by  the  perpetual  difficulty 
of  theology — the  resistance  offered  to  any  doctrine  of 
God  by  the  facts  of  contingency,  of  imperfection,  of 
evil.  Hence  to  Aristotle  God  was  a  consciousness  self- 
contained  in  the  exclusive  sense;  the  object  of  His 


80      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

thought  is  altogether  in  Himself,  being  solely  His  own 
nature  as  not  in  connexion  with  the  world  of  our  expe- 
rience. His  fulfilment  of  Himself  can  only  mean  the 
blessedness  of  that  contemplation  in  which  He,  the 
perfect  subject,  has  Himself  as  His  own  perfect  and 
sufficient  object.^  Nature  can  be  no  object  of  the 
divine  mind ;  no  system  of  divine  energies.  Nor  can 
the  natural  soul  of  man  be  a  self-communication  on 
the  part  of  God.^  We  have  a  God  apart,  who  is  the 
unmoved  mover  only  in  the  sense  that  nature,  a  process 
or  system  with  a  life  of  its  own,  moves  with  immanent 
teleology  toward  Him,  as  a  lover  toward  the  object  of 
love. 

But  here  it  is  not  with  Aristotle's  results,  but  with 
his  principle  that  we  are  concerned.  We  must  make 
for  ourselves  the  application  of  it  to  the  development 
now   before   us ;  the   development  of   spiritual   capa- 

1  Christian  faith  and  Christian  theology  face  the  same  difficulties  of 
contingency  and  imperfection  and  evil  that  drive  Plato  and  Aristotle 
with  remarkable  identity  of  logical  motive  under  great  superficial  differ- 
ence to  the  dualism  which  haunts  their  theology;  the  dualism  between 
the  empirical  world  and  the  divine  or  ideal.  And  Christian  thought 
faces  these  difficulties  in  far  intenser  form;  the  Christian  consciousness 
of  evil  and  of  sin  is  immeasurably  more  acute  than  the  Hellenic.  But 
also  with  greater  resources;  for  the  Christian  conception  of  God  is  that 
of  the  Father  of  our  spirits  and  the  Saviour  of  the  world;  and  the 
oecumenical  theology,  centred  in  the  idea  of  the  Incarnation,  is  a  doc- 
trine of  the  union  of  the  divine  and  the  human  natures.  (To  the  Pla- 
tonic and  Aristotelian  dualism,  and  the  overcoming  of  it  in  Christianity, 
I  have  referred  briefly  in  The  Study  of  Nature  and  the  Vision  of  God, 
pp.  216-232  and  251-267.) 

2  See,  however,  p.  147  infra.  If  Aristotle  believed  that  at  death  the 
Active  Reason  in  man  is  freed  from  all  relation  to  Passive  Reason,  and 
thus  in  some  way  restored  to  its  divine  eternity  and  absoluteness,  there 
would  be  in  that  some  reconciliation  of  his  doctrine  of  human  indi- 
viduality with  his  doctrine  of  God;  but  only  by  making  human  indi- 
viduality itself  an  inexplicable  union  of  two  disparate  types  of  Reason. 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT  81 

bilities  which  is  our  own  experience  and  history— is 
the  growth  of  us  as  individuals,  is  the  history  of  our 
society  and  civilisation.  And  the  first  step,  at  any 
rate,  is  plain.  The  potentialities  given  at  the  begin- 
ning, and  as  the  beginning,  of  our  experience,  do  not 
posit  or  create  themselves.  We  are  not  conscious  of 
ourselves  as  creative  either  of  ourselves  or  of  the  nat- 
ural order  in  which  we  have  our  development;  that 
man  of  sturdy  mind  who  wished  to  sum  up  all  phil- 
osophy in  the  statement,  Here  I  am:  I  did  not  put  my- 
self here,  was  governed  by  no  unsound  instinct.  How, 
then,  are  we  to  conceive  the  actuality  which  is  the 
prius  of  this  process  of  development,  in  the  sense  of 
being  the  source  of  the  given  potentialities,  and  the 
inner  energy  of  the  order  in  which  they  have  their 
development;  the  source  of  ourselves  and  of  that  sys- 
tem of  things  by  which  the  continual  increase  of  our 
being  in  experience  is  conditioned?  One  method  of 
reaching  a  conception  of  such  a  source  is  ruled  out 
from  the  beginning ;  the  method  of  taking  certain  parts 
and  factors  of  our  conscious  experience  (called  singly 
"things,"  or  collectively  "the  material  order"),  extrud- 
ing these  from  consciousness,  setting  them  up  as  a 
world  of  independent  things  in  a  realistic  time  and 
space,  and  then  viewing  our  conscious  experience  as 
part  or  product  of  such  a  world.  To  do  this  is  not 
merely  to  try  to  explain  a  whole  by  reference  to  one 
of  its  own  parts  or  aspects ;  it  is  to  try  to  explain  a 
whole  by  reference  to  one  of  its  parts  taken  as  that 
part  actually  is  not.     The  true  procedure  lies  in  just 


83      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

the  contrary  direction.  A  source  or  condition  must 
have  a  community  of  nature  with  that  which  is  taken 
to  be  originated  or  conditioned  by  it.  And  since  what 
we  are  trying  to  explain  is  the  possibility  of  a  spiritual 
process— a  conscious  experience — every  step  of  the 
explanation  must  refer  to  some  still  greater  spiritual 
reality  by  relation  to  which  human  experience  (as  itself 
organically  a  part  of,  or  organically  involved  in  the 
fulfilment  of,  that  greater  reality)  is  conditioned  and 
made  what  it  is.  Since  what  is  developed  is  concrete 
consciousness  or  spirit — consciousness  which  has  an 
intellectual,  a  moral,  a  social,  history — the  prius  for 
which  we  are  asking  must  be  adequate  to  the  gradual 
production  of  such  consciousness,  either  as  being  itself 
conscious,  or  as  having  a  nature  which  is  still  higher 
than  the  nature  of  spirit.  It  cannot  be  a  principle  lower 
than  spirit ;  and  the  man  who  holds  that  it  is  higher 
must  be  invited  to  explain,  as  exactly  as  he  can,  what 
he  means ;  in  which  case  one  of  two  things  is  likely  to 
result.  Either  he  will  be  found  to  hold  that  the  source 
(or,  as  he  may  put  it,  the  genuine  reality)  of  ourselves 
is  something  intrinsically  above  spirit,  so  that  only  by 
rising  out  of  our  spiritual  individuality  can  we  enter 
into  true  communion  with  it.  That  is,  he  will  come  to 
Mysticism;  and  then  the  problems  of  theology  will  be 
problems  for  him  no  more ;  in  him,  so  far  as  he  can 
attain  his  goal,  the  unquiet  spirit  of  man  will  have 
entered  upon  the  rest  which  lies  the  other  side  of  rea- 
son and  all  its  searchings.  Or  else  his  meaning  will  be 
found  to  be  simply  this :  that  the  principle  in  question 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT  83 

is  self-conscious,  is  spiritual;  but,  as  the  prins  of  the 
whole  movement  of  spiritual  development  in  indi- 
viduals and  in  all  their  history,  is  free  from  the  limita- 
tions under  which  spirit  moves  in  its  gradual  develop- 
ment in  man.  But  that  position  we  are  concerned, 
not  to  deny,  but  to  affirm. 

So  far  the  matter  seems  clear ;  unless  we  hold  to  the 
criticism  which  criticises  reason  out  of  existence  or  out 
of  connexion  with  reality.  The  question  of  really 
serious  difficulty  is  the  one  to  which  we  now  come. 
But  before  taking  it  up,  let  me  carry  a  step  farther 
the  warning  noted  a  moment  ago.  We  must  not  try, 
I  said,  to  explain  our  experience  by  extruding  from 
it  certain  of  its  own  elements,  hypostatising  these  as 
an  independent  system  of  things  in  realistic  space  and 
time,  and  then  regarding  our  experience  as  part  or 
product  of  such  a  system.  We  must  not  try  to  account 
for  our  experience  either  by  shattering  it  to  pieces,  and 
treating  the  fragments  as  worlds  in  themselves ;  or  by 
setting  up  entities  which  have  no  connexion  with  our 
experience,  and  which,  therefore,  our  experience  does 
not  warrant  us  in  affirming.  It  is  such  procedures 
which  really  deserve  the  reproach  commonly  directed 
against  metaphysic — the  reproach  of  trying  to  jump  off 
our  own  shadow.  It  is  a  gross  case  of  such  a  proced- 
ure to  argue  in  this  way:  Granted  that  the  growth  of 
human  experience  requires  the  operation  of  a  spiritual 
principle  which,  so  far  as  human  experience  is  con- 
cerned, is  absolute,  yet  it  does  not  follow  that,  from 
the  point  of  view  of  the  whole  universe,  the  spiritual 


84      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

principle  in  question  is  absolute;  absolute  to  human 
experience  it  may  be,  without  being  absolute  altogether. 
In  the  first  place,  the  man  who  holds  to  such  discon- 
tinuity in  the  universe,  must  come  to  terms  as  he  can 
with  that  belief  in  the  systematic  unity  of  all  exist- 
ence which  is  the  basis  and  presupposition  of  all 
scientific  work.  It  is  the  fundamental  faith  of  science, 
that  every  fact  is  connected  with  every  other  fact,  so 
that  the  ultimate  explanation  of  any  fact  whatsoever 
is  the  ultimate  explanation  of  all  facts.  But  leaving 
that  aside  for  the  moment — it  comes  up  presently  in 
another  connexion — let  me  point  out  that  it  is  not  a 
question  of  how  large  or  how  small  is  the  place  of 
humanity  in  the  total  system  of  things.  The  point  is 
that  history — all  the  history  that  has  been  or  can  be, 
however  great  or  small  the  place  of  mankind  in  it — 
is  a  spiritual  process.  No  man  has  ever  heard  of,  or 
in  any  way  discovered  and  investigated,  a  fact  which 
is  not  a  fact  for  consciousness,  an  object  of  the  exer- 
cise of  consciousness,  and  in  its  own  way  (by  free- 
dom or  by  compulsion)  a  determinant  of  the  course 
of  consciousness ;  which  is  not,  in  one  word,  an  ele- 
ment or  factor  in  the  development  of  consciousness. 
The  man  who  believes  that  in  addition  to  the  universe 
of  our  experience — I  do  not  mean  a  universe  com- 
pletely present  in  our  feelings  and  sensations,  but  the 
universe  which  is  the  sum  total  of  the  conditions  of 
our  experience  and  whose  order  is  the  order  of  our 
life — the  man,  I  say,  who  believes  that  in  addition  to 
that  universe  there  is  another,  which  has  absolutely 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT  85 

no  organic  relation  to  our  consciousness,  no  organic 
function  in  its  development,  can  only  be  invited,  first, 
to  give  his  reasons  for  believing  in  such  a  universe, 
and,  secondly,  to  describe  the  object  in  which  he  thus 
finds  reason  to  believe.  In  the  meantime,  one  must 
insist  that  all  facts  with  which  our  sciences,  our  phil- 
osophy, our  theology,  have  anything  to  do,  are  factors 
in  the  development  of  consciousness;  either  as  facts 
immediately  present  to  us  in  the  way  of  sensations  and 
feelings  which  influence  the  course  and  the  character 
of  our  self-consciousness;  or  as  the  conditions  of  the 
occurrence  of  those  feelings  and  sensations — condi- 
tions which  may,  or  may  not,  consist  in  other  sensa- 
tions and  feelings  in  us,  but  the  systematic  discovery 
of  which  is,  in  either  case,  the  business  of  science. 
Space  and  time,  for  instance,  are  forms  of  the  organ- 
isation of  our  experience.  The  whole  order  of  nat- 
ural fact  in  time  and  space— including  our  body  and 
all  its  animal  history — is  an  order  partly  present  in 
and  for  our  consciousness,  partly  asserted  by  us  in 
order  to  explain  the  presence  of  the  facts  already 
experienced.  The  "laws  of  nature"  searched  out  by 
us  are  laws  which  express  the  abiding  or  objective 
relations  of  the  elements  of  our  experience;  laws, 
that  is,  which  express  the  conditions  under  which  the 
elements  of  our  experience  are  given  to  us.  So  that 
the  laws  of  nature  are  laws  of  the  single  process  of 
which  our  experience  is  an  organic  part ;  a  process 
whose  essential  character  has  thus,  in  our  conscious- 
ness and  in  the  development  of  our  consciousness,  a 


86      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

revelation  of  itself.  This  does  not  mean  that  we  can 
change  natural  laws  by  our  wishes ;  can  by  a  wish,  but 
without  natural  media,  reunite  broken  bones  or  roll 
back  the  tides.  It  means  precisely  the  opposite.  Tak- 
ing natural  laws  as  they  are,  in  all  their  aspect  of 
compulsion,  the  place  of  them  is  consciousness  and 
the  production  of  consciousness.  The  facts  whose 
determinations  they  express  are  facts  in  a  spiritual 
process;  the  spiritual  process  in  which  individual 
human  experiences  have  their  being,  and  which  in 
those  experiences  reveals  its  character  in  part,  and 
gives  a  clue  to  its  ultimate  character.  When  we  use 
the  term  "nature"  to  denote,  not  an  abstraction  made 
for  purposes  of  scientific  convenience,  but  something 
that  concretely  and  actually  is,  what  we  have  is  a  cer- 
tain process  of  experience  and  its  implications.  Sense- 
impressions  are  given  to  us  under  definite  conditions ; 
and  as  we,  in  understanding,  trace  out  those  condi- 
tions we  more  and  more  become  acquainted  with  an 
objective  order  of  facts,  laws,  uniformities,  which  we 
call  not  "sensation"  but  "nature."  Such  a  process  is 
spiritual  throughout ;  is  throughout  a  process  of  modi- 
fications of  our  consciousness,  and  of  relations  of  our 
consciousness  to  some  greater  whole  of  reality  which 
must  be  kindred  in  nature  to  our  consciousness  in 
order  thus  to  exist  in  organic  connexion  with  it.  But 
I  need  not  labour  an  argument  which  in  spite  of  its 
rather  formidable  sound,  expresses  a  simple  and 
altogether  elementary  insight.  The  shortest  way  to 
bring  out  its  meaning  and  importance  is  to  remind  you 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT  87 

of  the  suggestions  made,  in  however  cramped  and 
arbitrarily  Hmited  a  fashion,  by  Immanuel  Kant;  and 
of  the  formula  in  which  Kant's  critical  insight  came 
at  last  (and  through  other  minds)  to  express  itself, 
die  Dinge  sind  Gedanken,  die  Gedanken  sind  Dinge. 
Things  are  thoughts — they  have  an  ideal  or  spiritual 
nature  as  elements  in  experience;  but  thoughts  are 
objective.  To  put  it  more  fully  and  more  fairly, 
things  are  elements  in  a  spiritual  process  which  is  at 
once  cognitive,  moral,  religious;  a  process  in  which 
the  experiencing  subject  comes  gradually  to  know  a 
world  and  to  apprehend  the  principles  of  its  natural 
and  social  order;  and  by  ideals  and  impulses  which 
constitute  his  very  nature,  is  called  to  a  unity  of 
thought  and  affection  and  character  with  that  order 
and  with  its  creative  source.  The  history  of  the  uni- 
verse, so  far  as  we  can  form  any  conception  of  there 
being  such  a  thing,  must  be  in  the  sense  just  indicated 
a  history  of  spiritual  life.  That  we  must  say ;  because 
the  moment  we  ask  ourselves  what  a  "thing"  or  "event" 
prima  facie  is,  we  see  that  it  is  an  element  or  factor 
in  such  life.  So  that  when  it  is  urged  that  the  spirit 
which  is  the  prius  of  our  developing  spiritual  being, 
must  no  doubt  be  viewed  as  the  absolute  principle  of 
our  experience — the  absolute  principle  for  our  the- 
ology and  philosophy — but  is  not  necessarily  the  abso- 
lute principle  of  the  universe,  the  answer  is  that  that 
objection  will  have  a  serious  meaning,  or  any  meaning 
at  all,  when  reason  has  been  given  for  believing  in 
some  reality  other  than  that  which  is  present  to,  or 


88      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

implied  in  the  possibility  of,  our  experience.  Or  if 
we  turn  the  negative  into  a  positive  we  get  the  truism, 
that  since  the  experiencing  subject  and  the  experienced 
world  are  the  correlative  aspects  of  a  unitary  spiritual 
process,  the  principle  by  which  we  explain  our  own 
origin  and  capability  of  development  is  the  absolute 
principle  of  the  world. 

But  when  such  imaginary  difficulties  are  out  of  the 
way,  we  come  to  the  real  heart  of  the  problem  and  to 
the  real  place  of  difficulty.  The  actuality,  we  say, 
involved  as  the  indispensable  prius  in  that  process  of 
realising  spiritual  potentialities  which  is  the  life  of 
man  and  the  history  of  mankind,  is  an  absolute  spirit. 
That  spirit  is  absolute,  as  being  self-existent  and  self- 
determining;  for  his  own  existence  and  the  existence 
of  all  to  which  he  gives  rise,  he  requires  only  his 
own  activity;  in  the  creative  work  wherein  the  whole 
order  and  constitution  of  the  world  has  its  source  and 
maintenance,  and  the  history  of  the  world  the  ground 
of  its  possibility,  he  acts  altogether  from  himself. 
And  his  consciousness  is,  in  the  full  sense  of  the 
term,  an  eternal  consciousness ;  he  has  present  to  him 
in  one  complete  grasp  all  the  concrete  content  of  the 
history  in  time  which  by  his  creative  or  self-commu- 
nicating activity  he  makes  possible.  But  that  being 
granted,  how  are  we  to  conceive  the  relation  of  that 
spirit,  and  of  the  activity  by  which  he  makes  us  and 
our  experience  possible,  to  ourselves  with  our  keen 
sense  of  freedom  and  responsibility;  our  sense  of  dis- 
tinct individuality,  of  having  a  life  of  our  own  and 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT  89 

not  being  simply  modes  of  some  one  life  which  alone 
truly  lives;  our  sense  of  working  out  a  future  and  a 
fate  in  which  the  absolute  principle  of  the  world  may 
indeed  be  fulfilling  its  purpose  but  which  are  none 
the  less  our  future,  our  achievement,  our  fate?  That 
is  the  central  and  critical  point  of  the  whole  problem. 
In  the  rational  investigation  of  it  we  can  of  course 
begin  only  with  that  end  of  the  relation  which  we  our- 
selves know,  or  rather  are;  namely,  ourselves  and  our 
experience.  As  we  examine  from  within  our  expe- 
rience and  the  method  of  its  development,  an  answer 
grows  clear;  an  answer  of  the  only  kind  which  the 
case  admits ;  not  a  detailed  picturate  answer  for  the 
imagination,  nor  something  forced  in  immediacy  upon 
us  in  sensation,  but  a  general  (and  at  the  same  time 
concrete)  principle  for  the  reason. 

The  outstanding  fact  which  bears  upon  the  problem 
is  that  general  character  of  our  experience  which  was 
noted  at  the  beginning  of  the  lecture,  but  to  which  at 
this  point  fuller  statement  should  be  given.  The 
growth  of  our  experience  is  not  the  mere  laying  of 
additional  material  upon  a  passive  subject  by  an  exter- 
nal power ;  it  is  a  true  development,  a  process  in  which 
the  subject  is  himself  operative  in  the  unfolding  of 
his  own  potentialities.  Within  the  developing  indi- 
vidual experience  there  is,  indeed,  continual  action  and 
reaction  between  factors  which  we  can  name  only  by 
such  words  as  self  and  not-self,  subject  and  object. 
And  not  only  so;  it  is  precisely  in  and  through  that 
continual    action   and    reaction   that   the    development 


90      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

takes  place;  it  is  only  in  the  consciousness  of  objects, 
only  in  knowing  objects  and  acting  upon  them,  that 
the  consciousness  of  self — the  consciousness  of  indi- 
viduality, of  freedom,  of  responsibility — develops.  But 
the  process  in  which  all  this  action  and  reaction  goes 
on  is  thoroughly  misapprehended  if  it  is  taken  to  be 
a  process  in  which  a  purely  outside  power  acts  forma- 
tively  upon  a  passive  subject.  So  far  from  this  being 
the  case,  we  must  insist  (1)  that  our  experience,  in- 
stead of  growing  by  mere  additions  laid  from  without 
upon  a  passive  subject,  is  a  process  of  making  explicit 
a  systematic  content  present  implicitly  from  the  begin- 
ning; (2)  that  in  the  bringing  of  its  implicit  content 
to  explicit  consciousness,  our  experience  has  some  of 
the  most  important  characters  of  a  self-organising 
process.  Indeed,  it  is  precisely  the  fact  that,  while 
we  are  not  conscious  of  our  experience  as  self-created, 
yet  we  are  conscious  of  it  as  in  important  respects  self- 
organising,  that  constitutes  and  gives  point  to  the  ques- 
tion now  before  us. 

First,  then,  the  growth  of  experience  is  a  process  in 
which  we  realise  for  ourselves,  make  explicit  and  actual 
for  ourselves,  a  systematic  content  present  implicitly 
and  in  potentiality  from  the  beginning.  Take,  for 
instance,  any  particular  sensation.  Set  aside  the  ab- 
stract ways  of  dealing  with  it ;  the  abstraction  of  the 
realist  to  whom  the  sensation  is  the  psychical  repre- 
sentative of  some  non-psychical  reality ;  the  abstrac- 
tion of  the  purely  analytic  psychologist  to  whom  it  is 
a  sort  of  psychical  atom,  a  given  inexplicable  ulti- 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT  91 

mate.  Take  the  particular  sensation  as  it  actually  has 
its  being  in  some  man's  cognitive  and  practical  expe- 
rience, and  thus  in  the  history  of  mankind.  In  expe- 
rience we  deal  with  sensations  cognitively  by  tracing 
out  their  relations  and  the  conditions  of  their  occur- 
rence, and  so  apprehending  them  as  elements  in  an 
eternal  or  objective  order;  and  we  rely  in  practice 
upon  the  order  so  apprehended.  That  is  to  say,  any 
particular  sensation  in  its  actual  being  in  experience 
has  a  nature  which  we  apprehend  only  gradually  in 
our  whole  scientific  and  practical  development;  and 
which  we  could  adequately  comprehend  only  by  know- 
ing the  world  and  the  system  of  the  world.  Any  par- 
ticular sensation  develops  all  its  significance  as  an  ele- 
ment in  an  individual  experience  only  through  a  pro- 
cess in  which  on  the  one  hand  a  world  is  known,  and 
on  the  other  hand  all  the  cognitive  forms  and  re- 
sources of  the  experiencing  subject — perception,  con- 
ception, judgment  through  all  its  categories,  reason- 
ing— are  employed  in  knowing  that  world.  To  each 
man  his  sensations  (whether  with  or  without  definite 
volition  on  his  part)  are  communicated  in  accordance 
with,  or  rather  as  forming  organic  parts  of,  the  com- 
plete or  eternal  order  of  the  world.  So  that  to  do 
justice  to  any  one  of  his  sensations,  the  man  must 
apprehend  that  eternal  order;  which  again  would  re- 
quire that  his  mind  should  become  all  that  it  has  in 
it  to  be.  Precisely  of  sensations,  as  elements  in  the 
complete  or  eternal  system  of  reality — precisely  of 
sensations,  that  is  to  say,  not  in  any  abstract  sense. 


92      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

but  as  they  actually  occur,  and  are,  in  individual  expe- 
riences— the  maxim  is  true.  In  omnibus  partibus  relucet 
totum. 

This  already  carries  a  suggestion  with  it.  A  particu- 
lar sensation  in  any  given  individual  experience  re- 
quires for  its  complete  apprehension,  we  have  said,  a 
knowledge  of  the  universe;  which,  again,  involves 
that  if  the  sensation  is  to  be  completely  apprehended 
by  the  individual  mind  to  which  it  is  present,  that 
mind  must  effect  the  complete  unfolding  and  develop- 
ment of  all  its  own  capabilities.  And  the  suggestion 
is  that  a  sensation  for  its  complete  apprehension  re- 
quires all  this,  just  because  the  sensation  was  commu- 
nicated by  the  absolute  principle  of  reality,  in  whose 
creative  energy  that  particular  sensation  in  that  par- 
ticular mind  is  an  organic  part  in  an  eternally  com- 
plete universe.  The  innumerable  relations  which  ex- 
press the  nature  of  any  simplest  and  most  rudimentary 
factor  in  any  man's  experience,  are  "potentially  real" 
to  him — they  are  "there,"  for  him  gradually  to  trace 
out — because  they  are  actually  (i.e.  consciously)  and 
eternally  real  to  God. 

That  suggestion,  however,  must  be  considered  later. 
In  the  meantime  let  me  note  that  what  has  just  been 
said  about  sensation  is  frequently  put  in  another  way. 
The  question  is  asked,  Which  comes  first  in  the  building 
up  of  our  cognitive  consciousness — sensation,  percep- 
tion, conception,  judgment?  And  the  answer  always 
has  to  be  that  while  one  or  other  of  these  may  come 
late  to  formal  clearness,  yet  in  their  essential  nature 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT  93 

and  activity  no  one  of  them  comes  before  or  after 
another.  If  it  is  said  that  perceptions  and  conceptions 
must  precede  judgment,  or  else  judgment  will  have 
no  terms  to  relate,  the  answer  is :  that  shows  well 
enough  that  perceptions  and  conceptions  must  be  there 
if  judgment  is  to  be  there;  so  that  judgment  cannot 
precede  perceptions  and  conceptions ;  but  then  no  more 
can  perceptions  and  conceptions  precede  judgment. 
For  while  formal  judginent  may  come  late,  yet  without 
the  judgment  in  some  implicit  or  explicit  form — with- 
out the  synthetic  unity  of  consciousness  through  all  its 
own  elements,  distinguishing,  comparing,  relating 
them — there  is  no  such  thing  as  a  concept  or  percept 
at  all.  Then  do  sensations  precede  all  the  rest?  No; 
for  without  an  activity  which  is  essentially  that  of 
judgment — that  same  activity  of  distinguishing  and 
relating  in  the  synthetic  unity  of  consciousness — there 
is  no  such  thing  as  sensitive  experience,  in  the  only 
sense  in  which  sensitive  experience  is  human  expe- 
rience, at  all.  Rather,  we  must  say,  there  is  at  the 
beginning  the  potentiality  of  all  these.  There  is  for 
each  individual  man  a  world  to  be  possessed ;  a  world 
complete  and  in  that  sense  eternal;  a  world  of  which 
the  man's  own  experience  of  knowing  it  and  acting  in 
and  upon  it,  is  organically  a  part — so  that  the  form 
of  his  knowledge  and  action  is  self-consciousness. 
There  is  for  the  man  that  world  to  be  possessed  and 
an  experience  of  possessing  it.  And  in  the  possessing 
of  it,  sensation  and  perception,  conception  and  judg- 
ment, come  gradually  to  be  differentiated  from  one 


94      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

another  through  a  process  of  development,  in  which 
sensation,  perception,  conception,  judgment,  reason- 
ing, all  go  on  together  as  correlatives,  and  there  can 
be  no  advance  of  any  one  of  them  to  explicit  conscious- 
ness without  a  similar  advance  of  all  the  others.  It 
is  not  a  case  of  first  the  lower — as  a  given  element, 
able  to  exist  in  the  complete  absence  of  the  higher — 
and  then  the  higher.  It  is  a  case  of  the  development 
of  manifold  forms  and  capacities,  all  in  one  system, 
from  their  potential  state  for  us  to  their  actual  state 
for  us.  Indeed,  to  do  justice  to  this,  it  should  be  put 
in  a  still  wider  form,  as  a  statement  of  the  relation  of 
our  consciousness  of  self  (our  consciousness  of  our 
experience  as  our  experience,  our  consciousness  of 
individuality,  of  freedom,  of  responsibility)  to  our 
objective  consciousness.  Neither  can  be  said  to  come 
before  the  other.  There  is  no  consciousness  of  objects, 
as  distinct  from  a  succession  of  purely  subjective  feel- 
ings, except  to  a  self  which  in  apprehending  objects 
distinguishes  itself  from  them,  as  a  supposed  purely 
subjective  self  would  not  distinguish  itself  from  its 
feelings.  In  other  words,  objective  consciousness  im- 
plies, and  is  possible  only  through,  self-consciousness. 
Yet  that  does  not  mean  that  there  is  a  self  and  a  con- 
sciousness of  self,  prior  to  the  consciousness  of  objects. 
It  is  only  in  the  apprehending  of  objects  that  the  self 
is  aware  of  itself  as  a  self ;  and  only  in  the  cognitive 
and  practical  intercourse  with  objects  that  there  is  any 
development  of  the  self.  The  whole  movement  of 
knowledge  and  action  in  which  we  become  conscious 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT  95 

of  self  and  conscious  of  objects,  is  a  movement  in 
which  the  two  sides — consciousness  as  the  sense  of 
self,  consciousness  as  the  apprehension  of  objects — 
are  both  implicitly  present  from  the  beginning,  and 
come  in  inseparable  correlation  to  be  explicit,  and,  as 
explicit,  differentiated  from  each  other. 

Our  growth  in  experience,  then,  is  our  gradual  en- 
trance into  conscious  possession  of  what  we  implicitly- 
possessed  or  were  at  the  beginning.  And  we  should 
remember  that  this  form  of  our  experience,  as  the 
conscious  realising  of  what  lies  implicit  in  the  nature 
and  connexions  of  our  being,  holds  as  true  of  the  prac- 
tical consciousness  as  of  the  cognitive.  Our  appre- 
hension of  duty,  with  all  the  intensity  of  feeling  in- 
volved in  it,  is  an  apprehension  of  objective  relations 
which  constitute  at  once  our  own  nature  and  the  social 
order  of  the  world.  The  dutiful  man  apprehends 
himself,  not  as  an  atomic  individual,  but  as  having  by 
his  very  nature  as  human  a  place  and  station,  and 
hence  definite  functions,  in  an  objective  social  order; 
whether  it  be  the  social  order  simply  of  mankind,  or 
some  greater  social  order  of  heaven  and  earth.  His 
duty,  as  the  loyal  performance  of  those  functions,  is 
thus  not  something  alien  from  him;  it  lies  implicit  in 
his  nature,  as  a  vocation ;  and  his  nature  is  defined 
by  its  place  in  the  concrete  system  of  reality.  The 
moral  life  is  the  life  in  which,  whether  with  intellectual 
clarity  or  not,  a  man  comes  to  "know  himself" — to 
apprehend  himself  as  he  truly  is— and  to  be  faithful 
to  the  knowledge.    And  what  he  truly  is  and  truly  has 


96      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

been  from  the  beginning,  in  being  human  at  all — what 
he  finds  when  he  "comes  to  himself" — is  an  indi- 
vidual constituted  by  universal  relations,  and  capable 
of  apprehending  the  obligations  which  those  relations 
lay  upon  him.  With  or  without  clear  intellectual  con- 
sciousness, this  is  apprehended  as  a  principle  of  prac- 
tice by  every  good  man ;  in  the  prophets  of  the  moral 
consciousness,  from  Plato  onward,  it  has  come  to  in- 
tellectual clearness  as  the  doctrine  that  moral  good — 
the  good  in  which  man  fulfils  the  vocation  implicit  in 
his  nature — is  common  good,  good  in  which  there  is 
no  distinction  between  good  for  self  and  good  for 
others.  Hence  it  is,  too,  that  the  principle  of  morality 
cannot  stop  short  at  mere  morality,  but  is  fulfilled  only 
in  religion;  truly  to  know  ourselves  is  to  know  the 
eternal  principle  of  the  world's  order,  and  to  be  called 
to  unity  with  it  in  all  the  energies  of  our  nature,  all  the 
devotions  of  our  will,  all  the  achievements  of  our  life. 
Both  for  the  cognitive  and  for  the  practical  con- 
sciousness— still  more  for  the  two  together  as  con- 
stituting our  life  in  the  integrity  of  its  actual  move- 
ment— the  true  account  lies,  then,  in  recognising  no 
mere  process  of  the  external  manufacture  of  expe- 
rience out  of  elements  some  of  which  exist  prior  to 
others;  nor  any  process  of  the  merely  external  addi- 
tion of  higher  elements  on  the  top  of  previously  given 
lower  ones ;  but  an  organic  unity  of  development — the 
organic  unity  of  a  movement  in  which  man  more  and 
more  apprehends  in  his  own  consciousness,  more  and 
more  achieves  by  his  own  will,  the  potentialities  and 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT  97 

the  vocation  which  he  in  his  nature  by  reason  of  its 
universal  and  eternal  relations.  To  put  it  in  a  form 
which  would  have  been  understood  in  the  thirteenth 
century,  and  ought  not  to  be  misunderstood  in  the 
twentieth,  man  is  a  self-conscious  and  self -determin- 
ing unit  in  the  totum  simul  of  a  complete  or  eternal 
system,  and  through  and  in  his  growing  self -conscious- 
ness and  self-determination,  he  enters  more  and  more 
into  possession  of  the  eternal  reality  of  which  he  and 
his  experience  are  themselves  a  part.  Into  that  pos- 
session he  enters  through  an  experience  which  is  sub- 
jective and  objective  in  the  deepest  sense  of  both 
terms.  He  apprehends  the  reality  of  the  world,  and 
in  knowing  that  reality,  knows  the  reality  of  his  own 
individual  nature  and  being;  but  he  is  able  to  know 
the  world  only  in  knowing  himself  and  the  world 
within  him — finding  in  himself  the  key  to  the  nature 
of  the  world,  and  in  the  nature  of  the  world  the  reve- 
lation "in  large  letters"  of  himself.  The  true  return 
upon  self,  the  true  "entering  into  one's  self"  is  thus 
in  the  most  real  sense  a  taking  possession  of  the  world  ; 
while  the  casting  one's  self  into  the  world's  great 
causes  of  truth  and  of  good  is  the  true  finding  of  one's 
self.  And  the  growth  of  human  experience  as  a  pro- 
cess in  which  self-conscious  individuals  thus  enter  by 
knowledge  and  action  into  the  truth  of  themselves  as 
members  of  an  eternal  system,  so  that  they  cannot 
know  it  without  knowing  themselves,  or  know  them- 
selves without  knowing  it; — this  growth  is  a  process 
in  which,  so  far  as  we  do  justice  to  our  nature,  there 


98      CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

is  built  up  in  us  a  consciousness  which  in  the  true 
form  of  its  idea  is  an  eternal  consciousness.  The 
problem  now  before  us  might  in  fact  be  put  in  this 
way :  How  is  it  that  for  man,  a  creature  who  comes 
into  being  in  time,  there  lies  open  the  possibility  of  such 
gradual  establishment  in  him  of  an  eternal  conscious- 
ness? 

The  very  fact  which  leads  to  such  a  statement  of 
the  problem  conveys  also  a  suggestion  for  its  solution ; 
the  suggestion  noted  a  moment  ago  in  connexion  with 
sensation  and  the  scientific  process  in  which  we  en- 
deavour to  grasp  the  nature  and  relations  of  our  sen- 
sations as  elements  in  a  single  eternal  system.  Here 
that  same  suggestion  takes  this  form.  Our  growth 
in  experience  is  our  gradual  making  clear  to  our  own 
consciousness,  our  gradual  realising  by  our  own  will, 
of  what  at  the  beginning  we  possessed  implicitly,  or 
potentially  were.  And  such  entering  into  the  reality 
of  our  being  means  making  ourselves  intellectually  and 
practically  at  home  in  an  eternal  system.  Does  not 
this  suggest  that  the  absolute  principle,  the  creative 
and  organising  energy,  of  that  whole  system  is  itself 
an  eternal  consciousness,  and  that,  by  some  reproduc- 
tion or  self-communication,  it  is  present  in  us  as  the 
principle  of  our  individuality;  so  that  human  nature 
has  potentialities,  in  the  loyal  and  faithful  realising  of 
which  each  of  us  more  and  more  finds  and  fills  his 
own  peculiar  station  in  the  total  system  of  things? 

But  before  considering  that,  there  is  a  second  point 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT  99 

of  description  to  be  taken  up.^  As  we  have  just  seen, 
the  development  of  our  experience  means  bringing  to 
explicit  consciousness,  bringing  to  deHberate  posses- 
sion and  achievement,  that  systematic  content  vv^hich 
is  implicit  in  the  most  elementary  beginnings  or  parts 
of  our  life;  implicit  in  the  sensations  that  we  refer  to 
an  objective  order,  thus  apprehending  them  as  ele- 
ments that  have  their  character  and  place  in  the  single 
complete  system  of  reality;  implicit  in  the  most  rudi- 
mentary sense  of  obligation.  This  second  point  is,  that 
in  all  this  development  of  our  experience  we  ourselves 
are  active.  Our  experience,  in  its  movement  from 
implicit  to  explicit,  from  vague  to  clear,  from  poten- 
tial to  actual,  is  in  important  respects  self-organising. 
The  analytic  psychologist  distinguishes  for  us  the  ele- 
ments in  the  process  of  experience;  but  so  far  as  he 
does  justice  to  the  experience  which  he  observes,  he 
is  himself  the  first  to  break  away  from  Hume's  point 
of  view,  and  to  tell  us  that  the  elements  which  he  has 
distinguished  are  elements  that  have  their  nature  and 
their  being  in  a  process.  They  are  not  "eternal  dis- 
tinct existences";  not  a  given  raw  material  of  expe- 
rience, in  the  sense  that  they  exist  prior  to  experience 
or  in  abstraction  from  experience,  and,  as  thus  exist- 
ing, have  in  their  own  right  a  nature  and  laws  of  their 
own;  so  that  experience  is  built  up  out  of  psychical 
atoms,  the  form  of  the  construction,  the  course  of  the 
groupings  and  successions,  being  determined  by  the 
laws  and  qualities  which  those  atoms  possess  in  their 

1  See  page  90  above. 


100    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

own  right  as  their  nature.  There  are  no  such  things 
as  elements  of  experience  apart  from  functions  of 
consciousness.  It  is  through  and  in  functions  of  con- 
sciousness that  elements  of  experience  are  what  they 
are;  there  is  a  process  going  on,  and  no  scientific 
analysis  does  justice  to  it  which  does  not  bring  to  view 
both  the  elements  that  are  organised  and  the  laws  of 
the  activity  which  is  the  continual  process  of  their 
organisation.  That  activity,  as  already  indicated,  is 
essentially  of  the  nature  of  judgment;  and  is  involved, 
in  however  inchoate  a  form,  in  the  most  rudimentary 
stage  of  anything  that  is  human  experience  at  all.  It 
is  involved  in  all  such  sensational  experience  as  can  be 
a  part  of  human  experience — in  the  apprehension,  for 
instance,  of  this  blue  or  that  green,  of  this  sweet  or 
that  sour,  as  distinguished  and  related  elements  of  one 
conscious  experience;  is  involved  in  anything  which 
is  human  experience  as  distinguished  from  the  mere 
reaction  of  an  animal  organism  upon  a  physical  stimu- 
lus. Our  experience  as  intellectual  (to  confine  our- 
selves for  a  moment  to  that)  is  in  fact  a  process  of 
judgment:  on  the  one  side,  a  continuous  activity  of 
dififerentiation,  a  continuous  particularising  and  indi- 
vidualising of  facts,  even  though  it  be  only  the  infant 
child's  distinction  of  one  element  of  sensation  or  feel- 
ing from  another ;  on  the  other  side  a  continuous  activ- 
ity of  integration,  in  which  the  distinguished  elements 
are  more  and  more  brought  to  the  unity  of  a  single 
system,  in  which,  if  it  could  be  completely  realised, 
reason  takes  for  granted  that  it  would  find  rest  as  in 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT        101 

an  absolute  whole  of  truth  and  reality.  New  material 
of  experience  is  continually  being  presented  and  re- 
ceived ;  but  received  neither  passively,  nor  as  foreign 
matter;  it  is  received  by  being  related  to  the  matter 
of  experience  already  present,  upon  the  silent  assump- 
tion that  the  new  and  the  old  form  one  system,  so 
that  the  real  nature  of  the  old  is  more  fully  appre- 
hended by  receiving  and  apprehending  the  new.  And 
as  the  single  web  is  thus  woven  wider  to  take  in  the 
new  materials,  there  is  a  definite  method  in  the  weav- 
ing; the  synthetic  or  relating  activity  by  which  new 
material  finds  its  place  in  experience,  and  yet  the  syn- 
thetic unity  of  the  experience  is  maintained — widened 
and  deepened  in  being  maintained — goes  on  in  those 
regular  and  definite  ways,  which  it  is  the  business  of 
logic,  as  in  Kant  or  Fichte,  in  Plato  or  Hegel,  to 
analyse  out.  These,  since  they  are  the  functions 
through  which  our  experience  has  its  order,  cannot  be 
derived  from  particular  objects  as  these  might  be  sup- 
posed to  be  apart  from  those  functions ;  for  particular 
objects,  as  elements  of  experience,  are  what  they  are 
only  in  that  order,  and  only  through  the  exercise  of 
those  functions.  So  that  these  latter,  as  the  forms  of 
that  activity  of  judgment  in  and  through  which  our 
experience  has  its  continually  growing  synthetic  unity, 
express  the  very  nature  and  constitution  of  our  mind 
as  intelligence;  a  nature  which  only  in  experience 
develops  to  clear  and  systematic  consciousness  of  itself 
and  of  a  world;  but  apart  from  which  experience  as 
synthetic  and  potentially  systematic  would  not  be  pos- 


103    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

sible  at  all.  Furthermore,  it  is  involved  in  what  has 
just  been  said  that  these  functions  or  categories  them- 
selves form  a  systematic  order.  They  are  the  expres- 
sions of  a  single  category — the  many  sides  of  a  single 
operative  conception  or  principle — which  consciously 
or  unconsciously  governs  all  the  work  of  our  intelli- 
gence whether  in  our  common  or  our  scientific  ac- 
quaintance with  the  world :  the  conception,  namely, 
of  the  systematic  unity  of  all  existence,  the  conception 
that  all  the  objects  to  which  we  refer  our  sensations, 
and  all  our  sensations  as  referable  to  objects,  form  a 
single  world  whose  constitution  is  an  eternal  system 
of  relations.  To  take  but  one  instance  when  every 
step  that  every  scientific  man  has  taken  from  the  be- 
ginnings of  science  until  now  is  an  instance,  if  the  man 
of  electrical  science  sees  a  spark  where  the  laws  of 
electricity,  as  so  far  known  to  him,  do  not  call  for  it, 
he  never  dreams  of  freeing  himself  from  the  pressure 
of  the  problem  by  a  pluralistic  hypothesis;  never 
dreams  of  leaving  the  "new"  fact  standing  as  an  iso- 
lated fact  which  can  just  exist  by  itself.  He  seeks  to 
set  that  fact  in  its  place  in  an  order  of  nature ;  an  order 
one  and  abiding.  If  he  succeeds,  he  may  possibly, 
not  overturn,  but  reorganise,  the  science  of  his  day. 
But  all  such  modifying  and  reconstituting  of  scientific 
opinion — in  a  word,  all  the  growth  of  science — pro- 
ceeds under  the  impulse  and  governance  of  the  concep- 
tion of  an  absolute  truth  toward  which  we  move  by 
the  continual  correcting  and  revising  of  inadequate 
views ;  revising  and  correcting  which  have  no  meaning 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT        103 

except  under  the  conception  of  such  an  absolute  or 
total  truth,  and  which  our  minds  would  never  under- 
take at  all  were  they  not  implicitly  animated  and  gov- 
erned by  such  a  conception.  And  this  is  no  conception 
of  an  abstract  goal ;  it  is  the  conception  of  a  concrete 
or  all-inclusive  whole  of  knowledge  which  we  more 
and  more  realise  as  we  move  upward  by  the  continual 
reconstituting,  the  continual  widening  and  deepening, 
of  our  present  abstract  and  piecemeal  views  of  things. 
Absolute  truth  means  reality,  as  a  single  or  total  or 
eternal  order,  fully  known.  The  animation  of  the 
mind  of  man  by  such  an  idea  suggests,  once  more,  that 
reality  completely  or  eternally  knows  itself — is,  in  a 
creative  principle  of  unity,  completely  conscious  of 
itself  as  an  Idee — and  that  that  principle  of  unity  pro- 
gressively communicates  or  reproduces  itself  in  and 
as  the  progressive  soul  of  man;  a  soul  progressive  just 
because  of  its  implicit  animation  by  such  conceptions — 
conceptions  which  lay  absolute  demands  upon  imper- 
fect experiences.  Once  more,  however,  that  suggestion 
must  stand  over  until  the  matter  of  fact  has  been 
stated.  The  point  now  before  us — the  activity  of  man 
in  organising  his  own  experience  in  accordance  with 
operative  conceptions  which  constitute  the  very  nature 
of  his  mind — is  exceedingly  well  put  by  Mr.  Bradley. 
We  must  not  fall  into  the  confusion,  he  reminds  us, 
between  "that  which  the  mind  has  got  before  it"  and 
"that  which  it  has  within  itself."  For  it  is  the  whole 
of  the  mind  which  works  upon  particular  facts ;  and 
the  whole  of  the  mind  means  the  idea  of  reality  as  a 


104    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

single  system,  a  single  concrete  and  absolute  fact, 
working  upon  the  particular  facts  which  as  presented 
are  fragmentary  and  abstract.  "Before  the  mind  there 
is  a  single  conception  [Mr.  Bradley  is  speaking  of  the 
Dialectic  Method],  but  the  whole  mind  itself,  which 
does  not  appear,  engages  in  the  process,  operates  on 
the  datum,  and  produces  the  result.  The  opposition 
between  the  real,  in  that  fragmentary  character  in 
which  the  mind  possesses  it,  and  the  true  reality  felt 
within  the  mind,  is  the  moving  cause  of  that  unrest 
which  sets  up  the  dialectical  process"^ — sets  up,  we 
may  say,  not  only  the  dialectic  movement  from  con- 
ception to  conception,  but  the  whole  process  of  inves- 
tigation, the  whole  search  for  order  and  law,  in  all 
science  whatsoever,  and  in  all  our  common  uncritical 
experience,  of  which  science  is  the  criticism  and  the 
systematising.  Science,  to  adapt  to  our  own  use  fur- 
ther words  of  Mr.  Bradley,  goes  from  less  to  more, 
continually  overcoming  its  own  fragmentariness,  be- 
cause the  whole  which  is  both  sides  of  the  process — 
and  the  mind  as  animated  by  an  implicit  sense  of  the 
whole — rejects  the  claim  of  one-sided  data,  in  the  sense 
of  demanding  the  whole  which  is  at  once  the  limitation 
and  the  completion  of  those  one-sided  data.  Or  as 
Mr.  McTaggart,  commenting  upon  Hegel's  Logic,  very 
tellingly  puts  the  same  point — a  point  which,  in  a 
moment,  I  shall  have  to  insist  is  as  true  of  conduct 
as  it  is  of  science — our  explicit  ideas  are  all  abstract ; 
that  is  to  say,  our  facts,  so  far  as  we  have  got  them 

1  The  Principles  of  Logic,  1883,  p.  381. 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT        105 

consciously  present  to  ourselves,  are  incomplete  and 
fragmentary.  But  with  this  abstractness  we  cannot 
be  satisfied,  and  therefore  strive  continually  to  round 
those  abstract  ideas  out  into  an  idea  which,  if  realised, 
would  be  concrete  or  absolute;  an  all-inclusive  and 
completely  organic  whole  of  experience.  And  what 
prevents  us  from  resting  in  those  abstract  or  frag- 
mentary ideas,  what  makes  us  labour  perpetually  to 
see  deeper  into  these  present  incomplete  facts  and,  it 
may  be,  to  transform  them,  so  that  we  can  hold  them 
as  an  organic  unity — in  a  word  what  makes  us  scien- 
tific in  our  thought,  and  intent  upon  ideals  in  our 
action — is  the  fact  that  in  us,  who  have  these  fragmen- 
tary explicit  ideas  and  experiences,  there  is  implicit 
and  implicitly  operative  the  absolute  or  concrete  idea.^ 
It  is  but  putting  this  into  other  words  to  say  that 
our  experience  is  organised  through  the  implicit  oper- 
ation therein  of  ideals.  In  cognition  there  is  the  ideal 
which  is  the  inner  impulse  of  all  scientific  work;  the 
ideal  of  the  systematic  unity  of  all  existence,  in  which 
every  fact  is  related  to  every  other  fact  in  a  definite 
or  eternal  order.  Such  an  ideal  it  is  which  governs, 
uncritically  in  everyday  experience,  more  critically 
and  systematically  in  science,  all  the  process  in  which 
we  widen  our  experience  of  fact,  while  at  the  same 
time  we  maintain,  or  labour  to  maintain,  its  synthetic 
unity.  The  conception  which  thus  prompts  and  con- 
trols the  cognitive  growth  and  organisation  of  our 
experience,  Mr.  Joachim  puts  very  well  when  he  tells 

1  Studies  in  Hegelian  Dialectic;  see,  for  instance,  §§  3-9,  71-90. 


106    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

us  he  has  never  doubted  "that  the  truth  itself  is  one, 
and  whole,  and  complete,  and  that  all  thinking  and 
all  experience  moves  within  its  recognition  and  subject 
to  its  manifest  authority"  ;^  expressing  in  that,  surely 
not  some  psychological  peculiarity  of  his  own,  but 
the  plain  nature  of  the  intelligence  which  is  in  all 
men  and  in  all  the  history  of  science.  This  ideal  is 
not  adopted  from  without  nor  built  up  in  any  external 
way;  it  is  one  which  the  mind  has  as  its  very  nature. 
Being  what  we  are,  we  find  intellectual  rest  only  as  we 
discern  a  unitary  and  self-consistent  order  in  the  whole 
of  existence;  only  as  we  are  successful  in  seeing  the 
facts  of  our  world  of  experience  held  together  in  the 
various  inner  relations  of  a  single  self -consistent  sys- 
tem. All  that  process  and  activity  of  judgment  in 
which  we  build  up  our  ordinary  consciousness  of 
things,  and  make  our  common  uncritical  acquaintance 
with  nature  and  society,  proceeds,  with  gradually  in- 
creasing clearness  and  decision,  under  this  governing 
category;  and  our  whole  structure  of  science  and 
philosophy  is  but  the  carrying  of  that  ordinary  con- 
sciousness forward  to  a  stage  in  which  its  form,  as 
systematic,  corresponds  to  its  fundamental  and  im- 
pelling category.  The  possibility  of  human  expe- 
rience is,  on  its  cognitive  side,  the  possibility  of  such 
an  ideal ;  the  capability  of  such  an  ideal  is  a  man  on 
the  intellectual  side  of  his  being;  the  operation  of 
such  an  ideal  is  experience  as  cognitive,  and  is  the 
history  of  science. 

1  The  Nature  of  Truth,  p.  178. 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT        107 

But  the  cognitive  organisation  of  our  experience, 
which  thus,  with  or  without  clear  reflexion  upon  the 
process  itself,  is  effected  by  the  operation  in  us  and 
as  ourselves  of  the  ideal  of  an  absolute  truth — the 
impelling  idea  of  the  object  of  our  knowledge  as  a 
single  and  eternal  systematic  reality  of  which  we  our- 
selves in  all  our  experience  are  organic  parts — this 
cognitive  organisation  of  experience  is  but  a  part  of 
our  complete  organisation  of  our  experience.  The 
cognitive  ideal  is  itself  a  part  or  aspect  of  a  wider 
ideal,  which  expresses  our  total  nature,  which  operates 
in  the  total,  or  as  we  commonly  call  it,  the  practical, 
organisation  of  our  experience,  and  in  the  progressive 
realisation  of  which  our  nature  as  a  whole  finds  all 
the  rest  of  which  a  developing  nature  is  capable. 

In  this  total,  or  practical  organisation  of  our  expe- 
rience, two  aspects,  or  rather  two  levels,  may  be  dis- 
tinguished; the  moral  and  the  religious.  In  the  prac- 
tical life  no  separation  can  be  made  between  these, 
without  the  gravest  injury  to  human  nature  and  its 
civilisation ;  save  that,  often  enough,  at  critical  points 
in  its  troubled  spiritual  history,  human  nature  has  been 
driven  to  set  its  own  fundamental  elements  and  inter- 
ests in  hostility  to  one  another,  waging  war  on  reli- 
gion in  the  name  of  morality,  or  (less  often)  on  moral- 
ity in  the  name  of  religion.  On  the  moral  level,  as 
the  ideal  now  in  question  operates  implicitly  or  expli- 
citly in  our  life,  it  works  its  way,  with  unspeakable 
labour  and  pain,  through  earlier  forms  in  which  it 
appears  as  rigid  adherence  to  custom  or  as  unques- 


108    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

tioning  reverence  for  law,  to  a  stage  in  which  it  knows 
itself  as  an  interest  in  humanity  as  such ;  an  interest, 
that  is  to  say,  in  a  type  of  social  life  and  order  in 
which  the  individual  members  of  the  society  can  come 
to  be  all  that  they  have  it  in  them  to  be.  Such  an 
ideal  cannot  fully  define  itself  (much  less  realise  it- 
self) in  a  life  like  ours  upon  the  earth,  any  more  than 
the  cognitive  ideal  can  in  our  present  life  realise  itself 
fully,  in  that  view  of  the  world  which  would  be  abso- 
lute truth — a  view  of  the  world  in  all  its  completeness 
of  detail  with  every  particular  fact,  every  particular 
element  of  experience,  seen  in  the  totality  of  its  rela- 
tions. None  the  less  its  inchoate  operation  in  us  has 
been  the  inner  spring  of  whatever  moralisation  of 
humanity  has  so  far  taken  place.  But  if  we  would 
be  true  to  the  facts  of  experience,  we  cannot  stop  at 
that  point  with  the  practical  ideal.  All  that  we  com- 
monly express  by  the  immense  word  morality,  it  takes 
up  into  itself  as  a  stage  or  aspect  of  something  still 
deeper.  We  carry  the  account  of  our  experience 
neither  far  enough  nor  deep  enough,  if  we  rest  satisfied 
with  saying  of  the  practical  ideal  that  when  it  comes 
(as  Socrates  wished  it  to  come)  to  clear  consciousness 
of  itself,  it  knows  itself  as  an  interest  in  humanity  as 
such.  As  a  matter  of  fact  and  of  history,  human 
nature  is  moved  by  an  interest  in  the  total  or  eternal 
reality  of  which  it  takes  itself  to  be  but  a  part.  It  is 
moved  by  the  idea  of  the  supreme  principle  of  reality 
fulfilling  itself  in  the  system  which  it  constitutes; 
and  of  that  fulfilment  as  having  in  human  nature  one 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT        109 

of  its  organs,  so  that  the  law,  or  purpose,  or  affection, 
of  the  supreme  principle  has  its  achievement,  or  some 
part  of  its  achievement,  precisely  in  the  loyal  devotion 
of  the  spirit  of  man  to  that  achievement.  This  is  the 
religious  interest  and  ideal ;  the  interest  which  gathers 
all  partial  and  particular  human  interests  into  itself, 
as  organic  parts  of  itself,  and  by  thus  gathering  them 
into  itself,  deepens  and  consecrates  them.  Here  it  is 
with  matter  of  fact  that  we  are  concerned;  not  yet 
with  the  source  or  conditions  of  that  matter  of  fact. 
And  taking  facts  as  they  are,  it  is  only  when  we  find 
human  nature  animated  by  this  highest  and  all-inclu- 
sive interest  and  affection,  the  interest  in  God  and  the 
purpose  of  God;  only  when  we  find  it  fulfilling  that 
interest  by  surrendering  and  devoting  itself  to  God, 
so  that  in  it  God  may  have  at  once  an  organ  and  a 
place  of  the  fulfilment  of  Himself  and  of  His  pur- 
pose;— it  is  only  then  that  we  fully  see  what  is  meant 
by  saying  that  human  experience  does  not  grow  by 
mere  additions  laid  from  without  upon  a  passive  sub- 
ject, but  rather  is  a  self-organising,  or  truly  personal, 
life. 

Our  position  so  far,  then,  is  this.  Beginning  with 
experience — experience  as  it  is,  experience  which  in 
one  sense  is  part  of  nature,  and  in  another  sense  has 
nature  as  part  of  it — we  found  it  to  be  a  process  in 
which  potentialities  are  realised,  an  implicit  content 
gradually  made  clear.  But  such  a  process,  if  taken 
simply  as  such,  is  not  self-explanatory.  We,  as  the 
individual  subjects  of  such  development,  are  conscious 


110    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

of  ourselves  neither  as  creating  ourselves,  nor  as  crea- 
tively instituting  and  maintaining  the  conditions  under 
which  our  development  proceeds.  And  in  any  case, 
potentialities,  as  such,  are  not  creative  energies ;  still 
less,  creative  energies  that  make  the  end  possible  from 
the  beginning.  But  the  movement  from  potentiality  to 
actuality  cannot  take  place  out  of  the  void.  Hence 
we  were  driven  to  a  theory  associated  with  Aristotle's 
name,  but  not  dependent  upon  that  name  for  its  valid- 
ity; the  theory  of  the  possibility  of  development  in 
the  priority  of  Actuality  to  Potentiality.  Throughout 
the  whole  process  there  is  present  and  operative  an 
Actuality  which  is  adequate  to  the  production  of  all 
the  reality  which  in  the  course  of  the  development 
gradually  appears.  Our  problem,  then,  came  to  be 
this :  How  are  we  to  think  of  that  Actuality  which,  in 
the  sense  just  indicated,  is  the  prius  of  the  develop- 
ment of  consciousness — not  simply  the  growth  of  your 
individual  experience,  or  mine,  but  that  total  process 
of  spiritual  life  in  individual  centres  and  social  orders, 
which,  as  at  once  involved  in  nature  and  involving 
nature  in  itself,  is  the  only  history  of  the  universe 
that  can  without  self-contradiction  be  conceived?  The 
answer  lay  in  a  belief  in  an  Absolute  Spirit,  as  in  some 
way  the  source  of  human  experience  and  of  whatever 
other  spiritual  life  there  may  be  which  has  a  history 
in  time.  But  the  conclusion  could  not  be  left  in  that 
form ;  further  articulation  of  it  was  at  once  demanded. 
For  at  once  the  critical  question  arose  how  we  are  to 
conceive  the  relation  between  the  Absolute  Spirit  and 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT        111 

our  experience  with  its  keen  sense  of  intellectual,  of 
emotional,  of  moral  individuality.  That  was  a  question 
to  which  we  could  hope  for  no  answer  in  complete 
detail ;  could  not  hope  for  such  a  knowledge  of  the 
exact  nature  of  the  creative  activity  of  the  Absolute 
Spirit,  as  that  Spirit  itself  has  in  actually  exerting  it. 
Yet  the  question  was  not  prima  facie  hopeless;  was, 
in  fact,  the  opposite.  When  we  are  concerned  with 
a  process  of  development,  and  are  asking  about  the 
relation  of  what  is  being  developed  to  the  absolute 
Actuality  which  makes  the  development  possible  by 
operating  through  all  its  course,  the  one  rational  or 
scientific  clue  to  the  nature  of  the  relation  is  the  inner 
nature  of  the  particular  process  of  development  itself. 
And  in  the  present  case  we  know — or  rather,  are  con- 
tinually entering  into  the  knowledge  of — the  inner 
nature  of  the  process.  For  the  process  of  development 
here  in  question  is  the  development  of  our  own  expe- 
rience. And  we  know  experience  from  within;  know 
it  in  knowing  ourselves.  Hence  we  turned  to  expe- 
rience again ;  to  the  individuality  with  the  relation 
between  which  and  the  Absolute  Spirit  we  are  con- 
cerned. And  what  we  found  was  that  the  develop- 
ment of  our  experience  is  the  movement  of  an  inner 
life.  Our  experience,  while  not  self-creative,  is  in  a 
very  real  sense  self-organising  throughout  the  whole 
process  of  its  growth.  That  growth  is  the  unfolding. 
the  bringing  to  a  more  and  more  systematic  conscious- 
ness, of  an  implicit  content ;  and  this  by  the  exercise 
of  inner  energies — energies  that  from  within  co-operate 


112    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

with  those  energies  without,  those  energies  more  than 
ourselves,  which  commonly  we  call  "the  world."  The 
total  movement  of  human  nature  from  potentiality  to 
actuality,  the  movement  which  is  at  once  the  develop- 
ment of  individuals  and  the  history  of  civilisation,  is 
actuated  from  within  by  operative  conceptions  which 
are  of  the  very  nature  of  man.  In  early  stages  there 
is  so  little  awareness  of  those  that  their  action  seems 
like  that  of  instinct;  as  the  eye  sees,  without  seeing 
its  own  construction,  so  at  first  the  mind  operates 
without  thinking  upon  its  categories.  But  they  are 
none  the  less  the  organising  principles  of  experience; 
and  through  our  very  loyalty  to  them  they  come  grad- 
ually to  clearer  and  clearer  consciousness  as  the  ideals 
of  humanity;  while,  through  that  clearer  consciousness, 
the  loyalty  to  them  becomes,  in  turn,  more  and  more 
intelligent  and  therefore  more  effective.  Thus  it  is 
that  elements  of  experience,  to  us  abstract  and  incom- 
plete, are  gradually  built  up  into  an  organic  system ; 
that  is  to  say,  are  gradually  apprehended  as  they  truly 
or  objectively  are  in  that  single  eternal  system  of  reality 
in  which  they  are  neither  abstract  nor  incomplete.  And 
this  both  intellectually  and  practically :  intellectually  in 
all  the  growth  of  science  in  which  we  more  and  more 
make  ourselves  at  home  in,  or  possessors  of,  that  eter- 
nal order  which  is  timeless  in  the  sense  that  it  contains 
concretely  time  and  all  the  content  of  time,  and,  as 
thus  containing  time,  cannot  itself  be  located  in  time; 
practically,  in  all  that  labour  of  man  toward  a  perfect 
society  in  which  science  and  art,  morality  and  religion. 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT        113 

all  would  come  to  their  own — new  heavens  and  a  new 
earth  in  which  a  purpose  of  God  would  be  fulfilled  in 
the  fulfilment  of  man. 

Such  being,  then,  the  nature  of  our  individuality,  we 
cannot  think  of  God  as  giving  rise  to  it  and  to  all  the 
process  of  our  experience  in  any  external  way;  as  a 
workman,  for  instance,  might  be  imagined  to  make  a 
"thing"  with  a  nature  intrinsically  different  from  his 
own.  Rather  we  must  think  that  human  individuality, 
with  all  its  capabilities  of  free  experience,  comes  to  be 
through  some  such  communication  (under  whatever 
limitations)  of  Himself  and  of  His  own  nature  on  the 
part  of  God,  as  gives  rise  in  us  to  a  life  which  is  an 
und  fiir  sich — a  life  which  has  a  centre  in  itself — and 
has  at  the  same  time  the  bond  with  God  of  an  essen- 
tial and  intrinsic  likeness ;  and  hence  is  capable  of  inter- 
course with  God — intercourse  with  that  thought  or 
activity  of  His  which  is  the  natural  world,  intercourse 
with  that  purpose  of  His  which  is  the  supreme  law  of 
the  order  and  history  of  the  universe ;  a  spiritual  inter- 
course or  communion  which  is  possible  only  where, 
on  the  one  hand,  there  are  distinct  individuals,  only 
where,  on  the  other  hand,  there  is  between  those  indi- 
viduals some  essential  community  of  nature.  Such 
intercourse  between  the  spirit  that  knows  itself  as  man, 
and  the  Spirit  that  in  knowing  itself  knows  the  whole 
order  of  reality  and  in  imparting  itself  imparts  the 
potentiality  of  all  knowledge  and  of  all  practical  attain- 
ment ;  such  intercourse  and  co-working  of  the  powers 
that  man  knows  as  his  own  with  the  powers  of  the 


114    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

spiritual  system  without,  the  system  which  has  its 
being  in  the  energising  of  God  and  is  called  by  us  the 
world;  such  intercourse  is  the  experience  of  man,  as 
that  individual  and  social  process,  intellectual  and 
practical,  moral  and  religious,  spiritual  even  in  being 
natural,  in  which  we  come  gradually  to  be  ourselves. 
For  our  coming  to  be  ourselves  is  no  abstract  process ; 
it  is  our  gradual  building  up  of  all  our  civilisation,  with 
its  earthly  and  heavenly  citizenship  of  the  soul  of  man. 
Just  how  God  can  thus  communicate  His  own 
nature,  and  give  rise  to  other  lives  than  his  own — indi- 
viduals that  distinguish  themselves  from  God  and 
nature,  and,  because  they  do  so,  are  capable  of  co- 
operating with  God  in  the  sense  that  by  the  exercise 
of  energies  of  their  own  they  respond  to  continual 
further  communication  from  God,  and  so  have  their 
"natural"  growth  and  development; — just  how  God 
can  thus  communicate  Himself  we  cannot  imagine. 
For  there  is  nothing  like  it  in  our  own  experience,  to 
guide  us  in  such  imagination ;  we  are  not  creators  of 
spirit — our  souls  are  not  the  place  and  home  of  other 
spirits  than  our  own.  So  that  we  can  never  hope  to 
apprehend  the  nature  of  that  divine  activity  in  which 
our  individuality  is  communicated  to  us,  as  God  Him- 
self apprehends  it  in  exerting  it.  Though  even  in  say- 
ing this,  we  must  remember  one  qualification :  there  is 
in  our  experience  upon  the  earth,  there  is  in  the  "rela- 
tions dear,  and  charities  of  father,  son,  and  brother," 
that  which  gives  us  some  clue  to  the  depth,  and  to  the 
possible  tragedy,  of  the  affections  involved  in  such  a 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT        115 

communication  of  life  from  God  to  man.  But  with 
that  quaHfication  we  must  accept  this  Hmitation  of  in- 
sight; and  to  reject  the  theory  because  it  cannot  re- 
move that  Hmit,  is  to  reject  it  because  it  cannot  meet 
a  demand  for  the  impossible.  The  ground  upon  which 
such  a  view  is  accepted  is  not  at  all  that  we  have  it 
forced  upon  us  in  some  immediacy  of  sensation;  not 
at  all  that  it  can  be  depicted  in  some  form  of  imagery, 
or  brought  to  the  test  of  some  apparatus  of  sense.  To 
demand  such  presentation  of  the  Absolute  Spirit  and 
of  his  way  of  giving  rise  to  the  soul  of  man,  as  a  con- 
dition of  believing  that  there  is  such  a  Spirit  and  such 
an  origin  of  man,  is  to  repeat  in  the  extremest  pos- 
sible form  the  mistake  made  by  the  purely  analytic 
psychologist,  when  he  cannot  see  in  experience  any- 
thing except  "elements"  of  experience  and  therefore 
demands  that  some  one  psychical  element — some  spe- 
cific type  of  feeling,  or  what  not — be  shown  as  the 
root  in  us  of  religion ;  whereas  religion  is  the  highest 
attitude  and  exercise  of  our  total  consciousness.  The 
demand  for  "proof,"  so  often  made  both  upon  the  reli- 
gious man  in  his  religion  and  (what  at  this  point  con- 
cerns us)  upon  reason  when  in  seeking  to  understand 
the  possibility  of  its  own  experience  it  rises  to  a  belief 
in  God,  often  is  found  to  mean  one  of  two  things, 
both  of  which  in  such  a  connexion  are  absurd;  either 
deduction  from  some  still  higher  principle;  or  experi- 
mental verification  under  the  form  of  sense-perception. 
The  view  now  before  us,  if  it  tried  to  make  itself  more 
convincing  by  giving  either  of  those  two  sorts  of  proof, 


116    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

would  but  show  that  it  had  failed  to  apprehend  alike 
its  own  meaning  and  the  nature  of  the  problem  from 
which  it  began.  From  the  point  of  view  which  in  this 
lecture  it  is  our  business  to  take — the  point  of  view 
of  human  reason  trying  to  understand  itself  and  its 
own  many-sided  and  most  wonderful  experience — the 
convincing  power  of  such  a  view  does  not  lie  in  its 
ability  to  furnish  proofs  of  a  kind  which  the  nature 
itself  of  the  problem  rules  out.  On  the  contrary,  such 
a  view,  if  accepted  by  the  rational  consciousness  at  all, 
is  accepted  on  grounds  the  same  as  lead  us  to  accept 
any  broad  scientific  hypothesis  that  goes  beyond  imme- 
diate verification ;  we  are  trying  to  make  something 
intelligible  to  ourselves — in  this  case,  the  possibility  of 
our  experience  as  it  actually  is — and  this  hypothesis, 
not  as  a  sense-image  but  as  a  rational  conception,  goes 
farther  than  any  other  in  making  intelligible  to  us 
what  we  are  seeking  to  make  intelligible.  It  goes 
farther  than  any  other  in  meeting  those  requisites  of 
an  hypothesis  which  Mr.  Bradley  has  so  aptly  stated: 
it  must  hold  together ;  and  it  must  hold  the  facts 
together.  We  are  seeking  to  make  intelligible  to  our- 
selves an  experience  which  is  not  self-existent  and  yet 
is  in  a  very  real  sense  self-organising  and  (as  self- 
organising)  self-determining;  and  the  manifest  way  is 
by  reference  to  an  experience  which  is  self-existent, 
and  to  a  reproduction  of  the  supreme  and  self-active 
subject  of  that  experience  in  and  as  the  human  sub- 
ject. That  supreme  and  self -active  subject  we  must 
think  of  as  sufficiently  like  us  to  be  the  source  of  us; 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT        117 

hence,  a  self-distinguishing  and  self-objectifying  con- 
sciousness, a  spirit  or  person — with  the  qualification 
(to  be  returned  to  in  a  moment)  that  in  his  personality 
he  is  the  source  and  home  of  persons.  On  the  other 
hand,  we  have  to  think  of  such  a  supreme  subject  as 
different  from  ourselves  in  the  sense  that  he  is  absolute 
where  we  are  dependent.  That  is,  in  the  first  place,  he 
is  altogether  self-existent  and  self-active,  while  we  have 
our  life  and  individuality  in  him — have  our  growing 
freedom  as  his  gift.  As  the  supreme  subject  of  the 
world,  he  constitutes  that  whole  order  of  things  of 
which  we  human  individuals  are  organic  parts,  having 
each  of  us  a  special  place  to  fill,  a  special  function  to 
discharge.  In  the  second  place  he  is  eternal ;  since  he 
constitutes,  and  thus  has  present  to  him  in  its  unity, 
the  whole  concrete  temporal  movement  of  the  world, 
he  cannot  himself  be  located  in  time.  The  temporal 
order  has  its  being  and  movement  in  him  ;  time  is  in 
him,  not  he  in  time.  But  our  human  consciousness 
enters  only  gradually  into  the  eternal ;  only  gradually, 
in  the  human  growth  in  truth  and  goodness,  becomes 
possessor  (as  mediaeval  men  would  say,  comprehensor) 
of  reality  as  it  truly  or  objectively  is;  that  is  to  say,  as 
it  eternally  is— a  single  system  altogether  complete  for 
the  divine  consciousness.  Facts,  in  their  presence  to 
God,  are  present  as  constituted  or  created  or  made 
possible  by  Him ;  and  thus  are  present  in  the  totality 
of  their  relations.  But  to  us  facts  are  present  as 
"given,"  though  not  as  given  externally  to  a  passive 
subject ;    given    piecemeal,    and    slowly    apprehended 


118    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

in  the  scientific  and  practical  mastery  of  their  rela- 
tions. It  is  in  God's  energising  and  in  His  self- 
communication  that  the  world,  natural,  historical, 
social,  has  being  and  that  movement  of  being  which 
we  call  life.  So  that  God  in  His  consciousness  of 
Himself  has  a  consciousness  of  the  whole  natural  and 
historical  order  of  the  world.  But  in  our  human 
experience  self -consciousness  is  abstract;  it  fully  pos- 
sesses neither  itself,  nor  its  world,  nor  the  unity  of 
itself  and  its  world  in  and  as  a  single  universe,  a 
single  organic  whole  of  reality.  It  is  this  abstract- 
ness  that  humanity,  through  whatever  growth  it  makes 
in  truth  of  science  and  of  practice,  continually  is  over- 
coming. The  idea  of  a  self-consciousness  which  in 
being  itself  would  be  a  complete  consciousness  of  the 
world;  the  idea,  in  other  words,  of  a  mind  whose 
apprehension  of  itself  would  necessarily  be  a  con- 
crete intuition  in  which  the  world  would  be  com- 
pletely or  eternally  transparent  to  the  subject,  no  bar- 
rier intervening  of  ignorance,  of  evil,  of  capability 
unrealised ;  this  is  to  our  human  self-consciousness 
the  inner  though  seldom  recognised  ideal  that  here 
upon  the  earth  animates  and  impels  all  intellectual  and 
moral  realisation  of  the  capabilities  of  the  spirit  which 
is  man.  To  us  it  is  an  ideal  which  passes  ever  on 
before ;  but  in  God  it  is  realised  eternally — or  one 
could  say  simply  "is  realised" ;  for  its  reality  is 
eternity.  That  is  the  soul  of  truth  in  the  otherwise 
ambiguous  statement  that  God  is  altogether  actuality; 
is  all  that  truth  and  goodness  which  we,  in  so  far  as 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT        119 

we  do  justice  to  our  divine  origin  and  live  in  the 
grace  of  God,  come  gradually  to  be,  but  the  more  of 
which  we  attain  the  more  we  in  vision  see  before  us 
unfulfilled.  In  the  third  place — if  for  convenience  I 
may  thus  distinguish  statements  which  are  really  one 
and  the  same  point  stated  in  different  ways — in  an 
activity  to  which  there  is  no  parallel  in  our  experience 
(though  in  our  experience  there  is,  as  we  have  seen, 
a  hint  of  the  deep  affections  involved)  God  repro- 
duces Himself  in  other  spirits,  and  thus  is  in  His 
spirituality  a  home  of  spirits,  in  His  personality  a 
home  of  persons. 

Certainly  such  a  principle  cannot  be  presented  to 
us  in  sensation,  in  perception,  in  any  form  of  picturate 
imagination.  But  apprehended  in  the  only  way  in 
which  it  can  be  apprehended — by  our  consciousness 
as  active  will  and  reflective  reason — it  enables  us  prac- 
tically (i.e.  in  religion  and  in  the  morality  which  reli- 
gion includes  in  itself)  to  organise  the  whole  of  our 
life,  in  which  sense-experience  itself  is  a  part;  and 
(what  at  this  point  is  specially  in  question)  intel- 
lectually to  comprehend  how  such  a  thing  as  human 
experience  is  possible;  whether  that  human  expe- 
rience be  the  common  labour  and  the  natural  affec- 
tion of  the  simplest  man  earning  with  pain  the  bread 
that  he  and  his  children  eat ;  or  whether  it  be  that 
astonishing  power  of  scientific  intelligence  and  that 
depth  of  moral  and  religious  passion  which  in  the 
labour  and  natural  affection  of  the  common  life  have 
their  promise  and  their  beginning.     The  movements 


120    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

and  the  structures  of  knowledge,  of  industry,  of  art, 
of  social  order,  of  morals,  of  religion — structures  and 
movements  which  are  the  civilisation  of  man  and  the 
history  of  that  civilisation — are,  we  must  think,  works 
and  products  of  the  spirit  of  man  in  its  communion, 
in  its  intercourse  and  co-operation,  with  the  Absolute 
Spirit  whose  impartation  of  himself,  however  grad- 
ually and  through  whatever  natural  media,  is  the 
source  of  all  life  and  of  every  capability  of  reason  and 
of  passion.  And  the  failures  and  vices  of  that  civili- 
sation are  the  failures  of  mankind  to  apprehend  and 
fulfil  the  demands  laid  upon  it  by  the  origin  and 
nature  of  its  own  life;  failures  the  ground  of  whose 
possibility  I  must  attempt  to  discuss  later,  here  re- 
marking only  that  they  constitute  the  gravest  of  all 
the  problems  which  beset,  not  merely  the  view  of  life 
now  being  presented,  but  every  view  of  life,  every 
type  of  theology  and  philosophy,  whatsoever. 

The  problem  just  alluded  to  is,  in  only  too  sadly 
real  a  sense,  a  difficulty  for  this  theory  and  for  every 
theory.  But  another  difficulty,  very  widely  urged,  is 
really  not  a  difficulty  at  all.  It  is  often  said  that  the 
reference  to  an  Absolute  Spirit,  in  our  attempt  to 
understand  how  our  experience  is  possible,  involves 
denying  the  reality  of  change ;  involves  taking  the 
world  to  be  a  static  universe,  shut  up,  as  Plato  put 
it,  "in  awful  meaninglessness,  an  everlasting  fixture" ; 
so  that  everything  has  already  been  done,  and  life 
loses  its  zest.  But  the  reference  to  an  Absolute  Spirit 
really   involves   the   opposite   of   this ;   it  means   that 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT        131 

change  is  intelligible  at  all,  is  possible  at  all,  only  in 
and  as  and  through  the  activity  of  a  spiritual  being 
who  has  all  the  changes  present  to  him  eternally  or 
totiim  simiil.  We  begin  with  change  as  a  fact ;  and 
Absolute  Idealism  might  be  summarily  described  as 
the  most  reasonable  hypothesis  that  men  have  so  far 
been  able  to  make  as  to  the  possibility  not  merely 
of  change  in  the  abstract,  but  of  the  actual  changes 
which  are  the  history  of  the  world.  The  actual  tem- 
poral movement  of  the  world,  as  a  single  history  and 
not  a  succession  of  absolutely  discontinuous  universes, 
each  arising  unintelligibly  from  the  void  only  to  return 
at  once  to  it,  is  possible  only  because  a  single  supreme 
subject  of  the  world  constitutes  and  holds  together 
as  one  all  that  movement.  That,  indeed,  is  a  truth 
so  elementary  that  it  has  its  witness  in  our  most  ordi- 
nary consciousness.  A  man  can  apprehend  events  in 
temporal  succession  only  because  he  has  time  in  him 
(as  a  form  of  the  synthetic  unity  of  his  conscious- 
ness) as  well  as  being  himself  in  time;  he  could  not 
so  apprehend  events  if  time  were  an  independent  ex- 
istence and  he  were  situated  at  some  point  in  it.  The 
development  of  the  spirit  which  is  man  means  the 
realising,  in  a  life  in  time,  of  a  consciousness  which, 
if  it  could  be  made  perfect,  would  be  an  eternal  con- 
sciousness— a  complete  intuition  of  reality.  We  do 
not  do  justice  to  the  development  of  the  soul  of  man — 
a  development  in  which  events  are  known  as  forming 
a  temporal  order  and  succession,  and  the  present  is 
a  continually  moving  synthesis  of  an  experienced  past 


122    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

and  of  an  expected  future  with  what  is  at  the  moment 
being  presented — if  we  merely  say  that  man  lives  in 
time.  He  also  has  time  in  him.  And  the  latter  is  his 
essential  nature;  the  former  is  the  way  in  which  he 
enters  into  possession  of  that  nature  and  of  its  con- 
crete object  or  inheritance.  And  such  an  essential 
nature  taken  on  the  universal  scale — taken,  that  is, 
as  the  nature  of  a  being  who  is  not,  as  man  is,  in 
course  of  development  and  thus  in  time  as  well  as 
having  time  in  himself — is  what  is  meant  by  the  abso- 
luteness of  God,  and  by  the  "timelessness"  or  eternity 
of  the  divine  consciousness.  Such  Absolute  Idealism 
assuredly  has  difficulties  enough.  But  it  at  least  does 
not  hold  to  any  such  meaninglessness  of  "everlasting 
fixture"  in  the  real  world.  It  holds  that  the  real 
world  which  is  at  once  nature  and  history — the  scene 
of  our  life  and  the  course  of  our  life — has  its  unity 
in  and  through  the  supremacy  of  a  continuously  crea- 
tive and  self-communicating  God,  who  is  limited  by 
no  external  relations,  whether  such  as  consist  in  the 
nature  of  a  realistic  time  or  any  other,  but  on  the  con- 
trary is  so  creatively  related  to  the  world  that  His 
knowledge  of  Himself  involves  a  consciousness  of 
the  whole  order  of  nature  and  history. 

It  is  worth  while  to  give  a  moment  longer  to  this; 
not  so  much  to  answer  an  objection  as  to  make  the 
point  itself  clearer.  When  we  seek  to  get  acquainted 
with  facts,  and  when  in  doing  so  we  correct  and  revise 
and  enlarge  our  opinions  in  order  to  bring  them  into 
accord  with  "the  truth  of  the  objective  world,"  we 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT        123 

really  assume  that  that  objective  world  is  a  single 
world,  in  which  every  fact  is  systematically  related  to 
every  other  fact.  But  that  singleness  of  the  order  of 
the  world  takes  in  the  whole  succession  and  concrete 
content  of  time ;  else  reality  would  not  be  one  world, 
and  its  order  a  single  system  of  relations;  rather  it 
would  be  a  series  (if  that  word  still  had  any  mean- 
ing) of  totally  disconnected  universes  succeeding  one 
another  in  a  realistic  time.  Often  when  we  reflect 
critically  upon  our  ordinary  thought,  we  only  half 
bring  to  light  the  principle  which  is  involved  in  it  and 
upon  which  it  proceeds.  We  see  that  in  all  effort  to 
know,  there  is  involved,  as  an  operative  conception, 
the  principle  of  the  systematic  unity  of  all  existence. 
We  see  that  when  men  say  they  give  up  that  principle, 
they  really  do  not  give  it  up;  they  go  on  thinking; 
go  on  judging,  believing,  being  scientific.  But  then, 
even  after  we  have  critically  accepted  the  principle 
which  all  along  we  had  acted  upon,  we  continue  to 
hold  unconsciously  to  a  realistic  view  of  time,  and 
think  of  the  single  system  of  reality  as  moving  on 
through  such  time.  But  a  unity  of  existence,  moving 
along  through  a  realistic  time,  is  not  a  unity  of  exist- 
ence at  all.  If  we  would  do  justice  to  the  idea  which 
really  animates  all  our  scientific,  or  potentially  scien- 
tific, thinking  (not  to  speak  for  the  moment  of  our 
practical  life  at  all) — the  idea  which  on  the  one  hand 
we  could  not  give  up  if  we  would,  and  which  on  the 
other  hand  is  being  progressively,  though  never  com- 
pletely, vindicated  by  every  step  in  the  continuous  ad- 


124    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

vance  of  science — we  must  take  the  unity  of  the  real, 
not  merely  as  a  unity  of  co-existing  things  which  moves 
on  through  a  realistic  time,  but  as  a  unity  of  the  whole 
concrete  content  of  time.  We  must,  in  other  words, 
think  of  history  as  a  genuine  whole.  But  then  comes 
the  question :  How  is  it  possible  for  history  to  be 
such  a  whole;  how  is  it  possible  for  the  content  of 
time  to  have  such  unity?  Absolute  Idealism,  whatever 
its  other  defects  or  merits,  has  felt  the  pressure  of 
that  problem,  and  answers  it  in  the  way  already  indi- 
cated. History  can  be  a  whole,  and  not  an  unintelli- 
gible temporal  series  of  disconnected  universes,  be- 
cause it  is  rendered  possible  by  the  self-communicat- 
ing activities  of  an  Absolute  Spirit,  who  is  the  su- 
preme subject  of  the  world,  who  holds  together  as 
one  all  the  temporal  movement  of  history,  and  who, 
in  presenting  to  himself  the  concrete  content  of  time, 
presents  it  to  himself  in  a  consciousness  which,  as 
being  single  and  complete,  is  eternal.^ 

1  In  saying  that  Absolute  Idealism  is  the  most  reasonable  hypothesis 
to  account  for  the  possibility  of  change — the  actual  process  of  change 
which  is  the  history  of  the  world— I  was  thinking  of  Professor  Royce. 
But  the  roots  of  such  Idealism  run  far  back;  not  to  mention  here  its  debt 
to  monotheistic  religion,  its  roots  run  back,  on  the  logical  side,  to  the 
point  where  the  problem  of  the  Many  and  the  One  first  was  raised  among 
the  Greeks.  For  when  we  think  of  an  objective  world  which  is  a  mani- 
fold of  matters  of  fact,  and  yet  is  one  world,  we  think  of  reality  as  a 
single  system  of  related  facts.  And  a  single  system  (to  come  nearer  to 
the  abiding  truth  of  which  we  continually  are  revising  and  enlarging  our 
science)  means,  as  comes  at  last  to  be  seen,  an  eternal  system;  a  system 
which  includes  in  itself  the  whole  of  time — the  whole  concrete  succession 
of  matters  of  fact  in  time — as  a  single  determinate  whole.  It  is  as  such 
a  single  definitely  constituted  whole  that  God  has  the  world  in  all  its 
temporal  history  present  to  Him  in  that  presence  which  is  its  creation; 
and  God,  as  thus  having  the  whole  of  time  in  Himself,  is  not  Himself 
in  time;  His  existence  is  not  at  some  one  point,  nor  between  some  two 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT        125 

To  sum  this  up.  Human  individuality  being  what 
upon  reflective  analysis  it  is  seen  to  be,  the  problem 
of  the  relation  of  the  Absolute  Spirit  to  that  indi- 
viduality has,  we  may  say,  two  sides.  On  the  one 
hand,  man's  life  is  the  development  of  spiritual  capa- 
bilities. And  since  potentialities  are  not  creative 
energies  that  begin  with  a  void  and  evolve  something 
out  of  nothing,  it  is  manifest  that  in  some  sense  man 
receives  from  God  all  that  he  has  and  all  that  he  is. 
But  on  the  other  hand  it  is  equally  evident  that  in 
some  sense  man  is  himself  the  builder  of  his  own  expe- 
rience ;  as  we  have  seen,  man  is  himself  active  in  the 
process  of  his  own  development ;  active  in  apprehend- 
ing, in  however  dim  and  prophetic  a  way,  certain 
ideals,  and  in  organising  his  life  as  the  effort  to  realise 

definite  points,   nor  does  it  merely  go  on  endlessly,   in   the  succession   of 
a  time  which  is  external  to  Him — a  realistic  or  self-existing  time. 

A  very  telling  presentation  of  this  is  contained  in  the  earlier  part 
of  the  late  T.  H.  Green's  Prolegomena  to  Ethics;  though  Green  occa- 
sionally used  forms  of  expression  which,  while  clear  enough  in  their 
context,  can  when  taken  alone — as  bad  exegetes  take  texts  in  isolation — 
be  interpreted  in  a  way  which  denies  Green's  own  insight.  For  instance 
when  he  speaks  of  God  as  timeless,  as  having  no  history,  as  independent 
of  time;  or  when  he  speaks  of  relations  into  which,  since  they  are  once 
for  all  what  they  are,  time  does  not  enter;  or  of  the  complete  (and  there- 
fore changeless)  knowledge  of  those  relations  as  forming  a  system  of 
thought  into  the  inner  constitution  of  which  no  relations  of  time  enter;— 
in  such  statements  he  does  not  mean  that  God  has  nothing  to  do  with 
time,  that  in  God's  consciousness  time  and  temporal  histories  do  not 
enter  and  have  no  place.  He  means  that  God,  as  having  time  in  Him- 
self, is  not  Himself  "subject  to  conditions  of  time";  is  not  a  being  that 
stands  in  the  flow  of  a  realistic  time,  a  time  which  is  external  to  Him 
and  conditions  Him  from  without.  And  in  the  same  way,  when  we  take 
things  as  they  really  are — i.e.  as  they  are  to  God — the  complete  system 
of  relations  which  is  the  order  of  the  world  (including  relations  in  the 
way  of  succession  in  time,  and  all  other  relations)  is  a  system  eternal, 
or,  in  Green's  use  of  the  word,  timeless;  it  does  not  lie  in  a  time  which 
is  beyond  it. 

When  we  are  thinking  of  the  concreteness,  or  completeness,  or  eternity 


126    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

them.  So  that  the  problem  of  the  relation  of  the 
Absolute  Spirit  to  human  individuality  is  the  problem 
of  holding  these  two  sides  together  in  a  single  view. 
And  the  answer  lies  in  this  direction.  In  the  deepest 
possible  sense,  our  experience  is  communicated  to  us 
from  God;  and  not  only  that,  but  as  we  shall  have 
presently  to  consider,  our  individual  experiences  must 
be  viewed  as  organic  elements  or  factors  in  the  self- 
realisation,  in  the  total  experience,  of  God.  But  that 
communication  is  made  not  in  any  external  way;  not 
as  any  work  of  an  external  power  upon  a  passive 
matter;  but  rather  by  communicating  a  life  and  con- 
tinuously co-operating  with  that  life;  one  at  least  of 
the  forms  of  the  co-operation — the  one  earliest  and 
most  easily  recognised  by  man  himself — being  what 

(the  three  words  mean  one  and  the  same  thing),  of  the  divine  intuition 
of  reality,  we  should  mark  one  further  point  concerning  what  has  al- 
ready been  described  as  the  animating  principle  of  our  human  effort 
after  knowledge  of  the  real — the  operative,  though  often  scarcely  con- 
scious, conception  of  the  systematic  unity  of  all  existence.  The  complete 
fulfilment  of  the  ideal  contained  in  that  conception  would  be  the  totum 
simul  of  a  complete  or  eternal  (though  not  in  our  case,  creative)  intui- 
tion. But  the  point  I  wish  to  note  is  that  it  is  not  involved  in  the 
validity  of  that  ideal  that  we  should  ever  completely  realise  it;  should 
ever,  by  making  discourse  of  reason  complete,  rise  above  discourse  of 
reason,  above  the  present  form  of  our  experience  as  developing  in  time, 
and  enter  upon  that  single  complete  or  eternal  intuition  of  reality  which 
is  knov/ledge  in  the  true  and  final  form  of  its  idea.  What  is  necessary 
to  the  validity  of  that  ideal  is  that  it  should  be  absolutely  realised  Jn 
the  creative  or  self-determining  principle  of  the  world;  and  that  with 
that  principle  our  experience  should  be  in  organic  relation — should  have 
in  that  principle  its  source  and  perpetually  sustaining  power.  Given 
that  view,  we  can  "put  things  together"  in  one  convincing  hypothesis. 
The  absolute  intuition  in  which  the  ideal  that  animates  our  intelligence 
would  be  fulfilled,  is  real;  real  in  and  as  the  creative  consciousness  of 
God;  the  presence  of  facts  and  relations  there  is  their  creation  and  their 
continued  "objective  existence."  But  the  principle  of  that  intuition — 
the  "synthetic  unity  of  apperception" — being  communicated  to  us  by 
God    in    and    as    our    intellectual    nature,    makes   us   to    be    intelligences 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT        127 

we  call  "nature,"  the  system  of  orderly  facts  and 
fundamental  instincts  in  relation  to  which,  and  in  re- 
action upon  which,  man  develops  his  being.  Such 
communication  of  an  inward  and  kindred  life  we  can 
express  only  by  saying  that  the  activity  in  which  God 
makes  possible  the  experience  and  history  of  man  is 
an  activity  of  reproducing  Himself.  It  is  .y^//-commu- 
nication ;  a  communication  on  the  part  of  God,  in 
however  inchoate  or  limited  a  way,  of  some  at  least 
of  His  own  powers  and  characteristics,  in  and  as  the 
individual  soul  of  man.  So  that  the  soul  of  man, 
whatever  natural  processes  or  age-long  animal  his- 
tories may  be  the  media  of  its  coming  to  be  and  of  its 
gradual  development,  is  related  to  God  not  as  a  mode 
to  its  substance,  nor  as  an  external  object  to  a  work- 
animated  by  the  ideal  in  question;  makes  us  to  be  "by  nature"  scientific. 
And  it  may  very  well  be  that  our  life  goes  on  for  ever  in  time,  animated 
more  and  more  clearly  by  that  ideal,  approximating  more  and  more  to 
its  fulfilment  as  to  an  infinite  goal,  but  never  realising  the  absolute 
intuition  which  would  be  that  fulfilment  in  its  final  form.  Such  approx- 
imation would  mean  the  gradual  building  up  in  us  of  a  consciousness 
which,  so  far  as  it  goes  in  apprehending  the  objective  truth  of  things, 
would  have  the  form  of  eternity;  yet  would  never  become  that  "intui- 
tive understanding"  to  which  would  be  present  the  whole  content  of 
time,  thoroughly  mastered  and  penetrated  and  thus  brought  under  the 
aspect  of  eternity. 

The  above  applies  to  our  experience  as  cog^nitive;  with  the  necessary 
change  of  terms  such  a  view  applies  even  more  deeply  and  searchingly 
to  our  experience  as  practical.  And  with  regard  to  both,  it  is  worth 
while  noting  that  the  most  important  thing  in  our  consciousness  is  what 
we  ordinarily  do  not  bring  to  clear  consciousness  at  all;  our  operative 
and  impelling  ideals.  As  was  said  earlier,  we  see  without  seeing  the 
construction  of  our  eyes;  yet  we  can  investigate  the  structure  of  our 
eyes  if  we  will.  So  we  ordinarily  think  and  act  without  thinking  of 
the  nature  of  our  intellectual  and  moral  being.  Yet  we  can  investigate 
that  nature  if  we  will;  though  never  so  as  to  make  completely  and 
clearly  conscious  to  ourselves  all  that  even  at  this  present  moment  is 
involved  in  our  consciousness. 


.128    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

man,  but  as  a  true,  though  incomplete,  individual 
which  has  life  in  itself,  and  just  because  it  has  life  in 
itself  is  able  to  enter  into  that  co-operation  with  God 
which  is  man's  life  as  a  life  with  and  through  nature, 
a  life  in  and  through  a  social  and  historical  order. 
It  is  because  the  soul  of  man  thus  has  its  origin  not 
in  any  external  work  or  creation  of  God,  but  in  a  self- 
communication  on  His  part,  that  man  is  what  we  have 
seen :  a  being  altogether  dependent,  a  being  neither 
self-existent  nor  self-intelligible;  and  yet  in  his  own 
way  a  creator  and  founder.  He  is  dependent,  in  that 
his  being  is  from  God ;  apart  from  the  grace  and  con- 
tinual self-impartation  of  God  he  has  no  being,  no 
freedom,  no  individuality — is  nothing  and  less  than 
nothing.  But  because  he  has  his  origin  and  continuous 
maintenance  of  life  in  such  self-communication  and 
self-impartation  on  the  part  of  God,  he  has  the  poten- 
tiality of  freedom ;  freedom  not  merely  as  having  life 
within  himself  and  energies  of  his  own,  but  in  the 
greater  sense  of  having  within  his  nature  the  call  to 
serve  by  his  own  energies  the  ideals  which  are  possible 
to  human  nature  because  the  eternal  and  absolute 
principle  which  constitutes  it,  constitutes  it  with  the 
demand  of  the  whole  in  it,  and  with  an  infinite  dis- 
satisfaction until  that  whole  be  realised  in  beauty  and 
truth  and  goodness.  Thus  it  is  that  man  comes  to  be 
as  the  potentiality  of  godlike  achievements,  and  as  at 
the  same  time  animated  by  ideals  which,  in  however 
dim  a  form  of  operative  conceptions  and  fundamental 
interests,  are  the  continual  impulse  within  him  to  the 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT        129 

realisation  of  that  potentiality  on  its  many  sides ; 
ideals  which  may  be  intellectual  or  artistic,  moral  or 
religious,  but  which  one  and  all  represent  the  bringing 
to  bear  upon  present  given  facts  in  their  incomplete- 
ness and  imperfection,  of  the  demands  of  an  absolute 
principle,  the  principle  of  the  whole.  Thus  it  is  that 
the  process  which  Mr.  Bradley  and  Mr.  McTaggart 
describe  mainly  on  its  intellectual  side,  but  which  is 
as  truly  the  process  of  our  conduct  as  of  our  knowl- 
edge, can  go  on;  the  process  in  which  what  the  mind 
is  judges  what  the  mind  has;  the  process  in  which  the 
concrete,  or  complete,  idea  implicit  in  us  makes  us 
for  ever  dissatisfied  with  our  present  explicit  ideas 
which  are  fragmentary  and  abstract.  That  process, 
viewed  from  above,  is  the  concrete  or  absolute  idea, 
implicit  in  our  minds  as  the  very  nature  of  them, 
striving  to  make  itself  explicit  in  and  as  a  conscious- 
ness in  which  the  world  and  ourselves  as  organic 
parts  of  the  world  are  apprehended  under  the  aspect 
of  eternity;  viewed  from  below,  it  is  the  fragmentary 
facts  of  our  experience  being  brought  to  the  bar  of 
the  concrete  or  absolute  idea,  and  there  put  under 
compulsion,  not  indeed  to  deny  themselves  as  false- 
hoods, but  to  enlarge  and  relate  themselves  until  they 
are  no  longer  abstract — i.e.  until  they  are  the  absolute 
idea.  And  what  is  here  argued  is  that  such  a  nature 
of  our  experience,  such  an  animation  of  the  spirit  of 
man  by  the  idea  of  the  whole,  is  explicable  only  on 
the  supposition  that  the  spirit  of  man  has  its  origin 
and  continual  being  in  a  self-communication  on  the 


130    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

part  of  the  principle  of  the  whole,  the  Absolute  Spirit 
who  is  the  eternal  and  creative  subject  of  the  world. 
The  process  which  is  thus  our  experience — the  pro- 
cess of  the  animation  of  the  individual  spirit  of  man 
by  the  operative  idea  of  the  whole — has  within  its 
unity  many  distinguishable  sides;  but  it  is  by  the  one 
broad  principle  of  explanation  already  indicated  that 
we  can  go  farthest  in  making  clear  to  ourselves  the 
ground  of  the  possibility  of  them  all.  By  a  self- 
communication  on  the  part  of  the  absolute  principle 
of  the  universe,  such  as  makes  the  feeling  for  the 
whole  and  the  demand  of  the  whole  operate,  however 
inchoately,  within  each  individual  soul,  we  can  best 
explain  all  the  aspects  of  the  growth  of  our  expe- 
rience, intellectual,  artistic,  moral,  religious.  To  each 
of  these  aspects  or  stages  of  the  organisation  and 
growth  of  our  experience  I  wish  to  make,  though  it 
must  be  in  the  briefest  fashion,  some  special  refer- 
ence; for  the  significance  of  the  whole  position  comes 
out  only  as  we  pass  in  review  the  great  factors  or 
organisations  of  our  life — the  scientific,  the  artistic, 
the  moral,  the  religious — and  see  how  in  each  of  these 
our  experience  is  possible  only  through  the  presence 
to  man  and  in  man  of  a  spirit  who,  being  absolute, 
at  once  includes  man  in  himself  and  gives  to  man  a 
life  of  his  own ;  an  absolute  spirit  in  whom  man  lives 
and  moves  and  has  his  being,  and  who  therefore  is 
to  man  at  once  transcendent  and  immanent.  In  this 
the  order  of  the  discussion  must,  of  course,  not  be 
taken  to  be  serial ;  our  life  is  a  single  woven  web,  and 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT        131 

it  is  only  by  principles  adequate  to  explain  the  whole 
that  we  can  explain  any  part.  It  is  only  by  such  a 
presence  of  God  to  man  and  in  man  as  has  just  been 
spoken  of,  that  we  can  explain  how  the  common  un- 
critical intelligence  of  man  is  capable  of  its  rough  and 
ready  acquaintance  with  the  face  of  the  world ;  only 
by  such  a  presence  of  God  that  we  can  explain  how 
the  ordinary  unreflective  good  man  is  enabled,  in  this 
world  of  moral  perplexities,  to  feel  goodness  as  a 
vocation  and  to  live  his  life  in  the  faith  that  without 
ultimate  defeat  he  can  perform  that  vocation.  But 
we  must  have  some  order  of  statement ;  and  the  most 
convenient  way  is  to  pass  from  abstract  to  concrete; 
that  is,  to  begin  with  our  experience  as  animated  by 
the  purely  intellectual  interest — our  apprehension  of 
reality  simply  as  truth — and  to  pass,  by  way  of  art 
and  morality,  to  religion.^ 

First,  then,  our  intellectual  organisation  of  expe- 
rience. As  we  have  seen,  the  ordinary  consciousness 
guides  itself  both  in  knowledge  and  in  practice — un- 
systematically  it  may  be,  and  uncritically,  yet  often 
with  an  astonishing  sensitiveness  of  conscience  and 
swift  subtilty  of  mother-wit — by  a  sense  of  the  bear- 
ing and  demand  of  the  whole  upon  the  part.  And 
when  that  ordinary  consciousness  systematises  itself 

1  The  discussion  in  the  text  confines  itself  to  three  of  the  four  or- 
ganisations of  experience  here  mentioned;  knowledge,  morality,  religion. 
To  the  consciousness  of  beauty  (I  cannot  bring  myself  to  call  it  the 
aesthetic  organisation  of  experience)  no  special  reference  is  made.  The 
position  that  would  be  taken  is,  I  think,  plain;  but  instead  of  trying  to 
put  it  down  in  set  terms,  it  is  better  to  refer  once  and  for  all  to  the 
discussions  which  for  all  time,  and  with  no  second,  hold  the  field — the 
Phaedrus  and  the  Symposium, 


133    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

into  the  body  of  the  special  sciences,  it  still  (allowing 
for  division  of  labour,  and  the  consequent  limitations 
of  view  in  particular  sciences)  is  animated  by  the 
sense  of  the  whole ;  now  in  a  specifically  intellectual 
form.  All  scientific  investigation  has  its  originating 
and  sustaining  impulse,  as  we  saw,  in  the  primary 
faith  that  reality  is  a  single  system  in  which,  with  no 
discontinuities  or  loose  ends,  every  fact  is  related  to 
every  other  fact,  so  that  the  nature  of  any  particular 
fact  whatever  can  be  fully  grasped  only  by  compre- 
hending the  complete  or  eternal  order  of  that  system. 
But  the  fact  on  the  one  hand  that  our  mind  is  ani- 
mated by  such  an  impulse,  by  such  an  intellectual  ideal 
or  operative  category ;  the  fact  on  the  other  hand  that 
the  world  continually  responds  to  the  search  of  a  mind 
so  constituted  and  so  animated,  so  that  the  mind  in 
thus  fulfilling  its  own  nature  more  and  more  makes 
itself  at  home  in  the  world ;  in  one  word  our  growing 
knowledge  of  truth,  whether  in  the  sciences  or  in  that 
knowledge  of  everyday  experience  which  is  the  begin- 
ning of  all  science; — all  this  we  can  make  intelligible 
to  ourselves  by  supposing  three  things.  (1)  Truth 
has  its  being  as  eternally  or  completely  present  to  God, 
in  a  presence  which  is  its  creation;  by  truth  being 
meant  reality  as  the  object  of  intelligence,  the  con- 
crete facts  of  the  world  in  their  concrete  relations — 
nature,  for  instance,  not  as  a  set  of  hypothetical  con- 
structions, but  as  an  actual  world  of  experience,  a 
world  of  sound  and  colour,  taste  and  odour  and  visible 
form,  with  all  its  sensible  frame  organised  and  gov- 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT        133 

erned  by  an  inner  constitution  of  intelligible  principles. 
(3)  We  are  capable  of  coming  to  know  the  truth, 
which  thus  has  its  being  in  its  presence  to  God,  by 
reason  of  a  constitution  of  mind  and  through  the 
continuous  operation  of  an  intellectual  ideal  (the  ideal 
of  the  systematic  unity  of  all  existence,  which  prevents 
us  from  resting  in  facts  as  they  are  first  given,  and 
drives  us  to  the  never-finished  but  continually  advanc- 
ing effort  at  the  scientific  systematisation  of  expe- 
rience) the  existence  of  which  in  us  and  as  ourselves 
can  be  understood  only  by  supposing  that  they  are 
communicated  from  God  in  that  communication  which 
is  the  creation  of  the  spirit  of  man.  (3)  The  commu- 
nication takes  place,  not  in  some  single  instant  of  time 
once  for  all,  but  is  a  continuous  self-impartation  on 
the  part  of  God ;  a  continuous  creative  grace  of  God, 
which  is  the  source  of  all  our  powers,  and,  in  response 
to  our  exercise  of  them,  gives  us  still  more;  so  that 
in  that  grace  and  in  our  co-working  with  it  we  have 
our  continual  increase  in  being  and  in  the  powers  of 
being.  Nature,  to  speak  of  that  part  or  aspect  of 
truth  which  has  been  specially  a  field  of  debate 
between  men  of  science  and  men  of  religion — nature 
is  an  activity  and  a  way  of  God.  It  is  a  system  of 
facts  present  to  God;  present  to  Him  as  constituted 
by  Him,  known  in  being  created,  created  in  being 
known.  And  we,  alike  in  sense-perception  and  in 
science,  are  able  gradually  to  enter  into  a  knowledge 
of  nature,  because  our  mind  is  communicated  to  us 
from  God,  and  hence  is  able  to  grow  up  into  a  deeper 


134    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

and  deeper  apprehension  of  His  thoughts  and  works. 
It  is  not  that  the  eternal  and  eternally  creative  subject 
of  the  world  imparts  the  content  of  his  mind  to  a 
merely  passive  human  mind.  That  is  as  little  true  in 
knowledge  as  it  is  in  morality  and  religion.  Rather, 
we  must  think,  the  eternal  subject  of  the  world,  in 
reproducing  himself  as  the  human  soul,  imparts  to 
that  soul  under  whatever  limitations  the  same  actively 
synthetic  character  (the  character  of  intelligent  spirit 
as  a  "synthetic  unity  of  apperception")  which  the  sub- 
ject of  the  world  must  have  in  being  the  subject  of 
the  world  at  all.  Hence  in  the  very  nature  of  man  as 
knowing  intelligence  there  is  that  operative  and  im- 
pelling conception,  that  sense  of  the  systematic  unity 
of  all  existence,  of  which  we  already  have  had  to  take 
note;  and  there  is  that  ascending  series  of  categories 
into  which  the  sense  of  the  unity  of  existence  articu- 
lates itself,  and  through  which  it  fulfils  itself.  The 
human  soul  thus  carries  in  its  very  nature  as  intelli- 
gence the  impulse  continually  to  introduce  order,  and 
unity  through  order,  into  that  comparatively  unor- 
ganised continuum  which  is  continually  the  "given" 
of  experience  and  continually  in  scientific  work  is  dif- 
ferentiated into  its  elements  in  order  to  be  re-com- 
bined into  an  intelligible  systematic  unity ; — an  "unor- 
ganised continuum"  whose  margin  we  are  continually 
pushing  farther  back;  and  can  do  so  because,  while 
it  is  given  to  us  as  comparatively  unorganised,  it  is 
not  unorganised  to  the  God  who  gives  it,  but  for  Him 
is  eternally  what  we  gradually  and  incompletely  are 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT        135 

making  it  for  ourselves — an  intelligible  world,  a  differ- 
entiated unity,  orderly,  systematic,  rational  through 
and  through. 

Communicated  to  us,  too,  in  that  same  self-commu- 
nication of  the  absolute  principle  of  the  universe 
which  makes  us  capable  of  science,  are  the  capabili- 
ties of  morality  and  religion.  It  is  by  a  sense  of  the 
whole,  a  feeling  for  the  demand  of  the  whole,  that 
our  common  consciousness,  in  and  as  the  life  of  the 
ordinary  good  man,  really  is  animated.  The  good 
man,  however  unreflective,  conducts  his  life  upon  the 
assumption  that  reality,  in  spite  of  baffling  and  tragic 
perplexities,  is  one  and  is  his  home ;  a  place  to  which 
intellectually  he  can  adjust  himself  (in  "common 
knowledge"  or  in  systematic  science)  in  an  adjust- 
ment which  is  no  denial  of  his  being,  but  on  the  con- 
trary a  genuine  realisation  of  it;  a  place  in  which 
practically  he  has  a  vocation — a  vocation  and,  in  daily 
duty  and  daily  affection,  in  daily  work  and  all  the 
struggle  to  make  the  conditions  of  daily  work  more 
human,  a  possibility  of  performing  that  vocation  with- 
out ultimate  defeat.  And  in  religion,  in  that  form  of 
it  which  alone  concerns  us  here,  this  is  completed. 
In  such  religion,  both  our  intellectual  and  our  moral 
organisation  of  our  experience  are  gathered  up  into 
something  higher ;  something  in  principle,  though  not 
in  detail,  ultimate;  so  that  the  demand  of  the  spirit 
of  man,  the  demand  which  gives  rise  to,  but  only 
partly  satisfies  itself  in,  science  and  art  and  the  moral- 
ising of   society,   finds  its  truly  concrete   fulfilment; 


136    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

the  demand,  namely,  of  the  whole  (which  means  the 
demand  of  the  supreme  and  creative  principle  of  the 
whole)  upon  the  part.  In  spiritual  religion  that  de- 
mand becomes,  in  the  profoundest  of  all  possible 
senses,  the  controlling  power  of  life.  The  man  pos- 
sesses and  is  possessed  by  a  moving  and  effectual 
vision  of  a  single  supreme  principle  of  all  reality ;  of 
the  nearness  of  that  principle  to  his  own  soul  and  to 
all  souls;  and  of  the  possibility  of  communion  with 
it — communion  with  it  in  a  devotion  and  loyalty  which 
animates  from  within  the  whole  life  of  the  indi- 
vidual, and,  acting  in  him  and  in  others,  seeks  to  or- 
ganise the  whole  of  human  society  into  the  brother- 
hood of  a  new  heaven  and  a  new  earth.  Religion 
means  that  such  an  all-conquering  faith  in  the  organic 
connexion  of  the  least  of  individual  beings  with  the 
supreme  principle  of  all  existence  has  assumed  definite 
and  historical  forms,  and  is  seeking  to  govern  the 
whole  of  human  life  by  bringing  all  its  energies  and 
institutions  under  one  inward  devotion.  The  faith 
and  the  demand  which  animate  uncritically  the  com- 
mon consciousness,  which  animate  intellectually  and 
systematically  the  scientific  mind,  thus  become  in 
religion  as  our  human  devotion  to  God's  purpose  and 
God's  point  of  view,  the  practical  determining  power 
of  life.  Without  such  a  demand  at  the  centre  of  his 
being,  without  such  an  interest  as  potentially  the 
deepest,  the  all-inclusive  operative  factor  of  his  nature, 
neither  could  man  be  religious  at  all,  nor  could  any 
grace  or  revelation  of  God  make  any  appeal  to  him 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT        137 

or  receive  any  answer  from  him.  But  to  account  for 
the  possibility  of  such  a  nature  of  man,  and  of  such 
an  interest,  we  must  think  once  more  of  an  activity 
on  God's  part  which  can  only  be  called  self-commu- 
nication. Such  a  demand  of  the  whole  upon  the  part, 
and  such  a  response,  mean  that  the  absolute  principle 
of  the  whole  is  present  and  operative  in  the  spirit 
which  feels  that  demand  and  makes  that  response. 
From  God  the  creative  principle  of  the  whole  there 
is  communicated  to  us,  in  the  communication  which  is 
the  origin  and  continuous  maintenance  of  our  life,  a 
sense  of  the  whole  and  of  its  demand  upon  us;  a 
sense  which  in  this  its  profoundest  and  all-inclusive 
operation  calls  us,  in  all  the  activities  and  capabilities 
of  our  life,  to  devote  ourselves  to  the  supreme  prin- 
ciple of  the  whole  and  to  His  creative  purpose.  We 
must  think,  in  other  words,  that  God  is  present  in 
man,  not  as  a  substance  in  its  modes,  but  in  an  al- 
together profounder  and  more  real  sense;  is  present 
through  such  a  self -communication  that  the  demand 
of  God  operates  continually  in  human  nature,  and  is 
responded  to  unconsciously  and  partially  in  science 
and  art  and  morality,  consciously  and  concretely  in 
religion.  To  put  it  in  the  language  of  the  religious 
heart,  it  is  only  God's  grace,  originally  and  continually 
constituting  us,  that  makes  us  capable  at  all  of  re- 
sponding in  any  form  to  God's  grace.  And  here,  as 
before,  the  impartation  is  no  merely  external  process. 
Our  capability  of  morality  and  religion  is  imparted 
to  us  in  the  form  of  those  operative  conceptions,  ideals, 


138    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

interests,  which,  as  we  have  just  seen,  constitute  the 
very  nature  and  inner  make-up  of  our  being;  interests 
and  ideals  which  in  our  first  possession  of  them  are 
inchoate  and  potential;  but  which,  in  response  to 
kindred  powers — the  powers  of  God  in  the  spiritual 
world  without — move  on  continually  to  clearer  con- 
sciousness of  themselves  and  to  profounder  operation. 
It  is  these  categories  and  principles,  impulses  and 
affections,  operative  conceptions  and  moving  interests, 
as  the  characteristic  activities  of  a  spirit  whose  life  is 
its  own  life,  that  make  human  nature,  in  a  sense  at 
once  higher  and  more  tragic  than  Shakespeare  had 
in  mind,  "servile  to  all  the  skyey  influences";  make  it 
capable  by  its  own  energies  of  communicating  and 
co-operating  with  its  eternal  source;  capable  in  its 
own  free  activities  of  receiving  the  gradual  imparta- 
tion  of  the  truth  and  goodness  which  in  their  divine 
source  and  home  are  eternal  and  absolute;  capable, 
too,  of  finding  its  rest — rest  in  the  one  worthy  and 
enduring  form,  rest  in  the  true  fulfilment  of  one's 
vocation — only  in  God,  only  in  such  a  giving  of  itself 
to  Him  that  human  life  becomes  God  working  His 
works  through  man.  This  practical  interest  is,  in  the 
first  place — first  not  in  order  of  time,  but  in  the  order 
of  statement  here  for  convenience  followed — an  inter- 
est in  humanity  as  such,  our  concern  in  our  fellow  men 
for  their  own  sake;  the  interest  through  whose  opera- 
tion it  is  that  society  has  become  a  moral  order.  This 
interest  impels  men  long  before  they  clearly  recognise 
its  meaning.     But  at  last  it  comes  to  know  itself  as 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT        139 

the  ideal  of  a  possible  perfection  of  human  nature, 
which  sets  us  upon  the  effort  alike  after  a  goodness 
of  individuals  and  after  a  social  order  in  which  that 
goodness  of  individuals  can  be  realised.  But  the 
practical  or  total  interest  does  not  fulfil  itself  if  it 
remains  solely  at  the  moral  level.  In  proportion  as  it 
does  itself  justice  it  becomes  that  interest  which 
gathers  all  other  interests  concretely  up  into  itself, 
infuses  a  deeper  soul  into  them  all,  and  brings  our 
nature  through  all  its  diverse  elements  and  impulses 
into  unity  with  itself  and  with  the  truth  of  the  world ; 
the  interest,  if  I  may  continue  to  use  the  word  in  a 
connexion  where  all  words  are  inadequate,  in  the  su- 
preme and  eternal  principle  of  all  that  existence  of 
which  we  are  but  a  part;  the  interest  in  God  and  in 
His  will  and  purpose.  Our  capability  of  this  interest 
is  our  capability  of  religion;  of  religion  as  the  con- 
crete and  all-inclusive  unity  and  activity  of  our  life. 
And  such  a  capability  we  can  account  for  only  by 
supposing  that,  appallingly  grave  as  the  limitations 
are,  yet,  under  those  limitations,  God  reproduces  Him- 
self in  us ;  is  present  to  us  and  in  us,  in  a  continuous 
communication  of  Himself  which  is  our  life  and,  if 
we  will,  our  growing  freedom.  Thus  it  is,  and  thus 
alone,  that  the  soul  of  man  is  capable  of  its  seeking 
to  put  itself  at  God's  point  of  view;  capable  of  its 
longing  to  give  itself  to  Him,  so  that  He  may  fulfil 
His  purposes  in  all  the  life  and  labour  of  our  human- 
ity; in  all  our  love  of  one  another  and  of  the  earth 
our  home;  in  all  our  sciences,  all  our  arts,  all  our 


140    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

morality.  Thus  it  is,  and  thus  alone,  that  we  are 
capable  either  of  seeking  God,  or  of  responding  to 
His  grace  when  (in  that  unceasing  work  of  Redemp- 
tion which  we  are  presently  to  see  as  the  essential 
process  and  reality  of  human  history)  He  seeks  us 
and  would  lead  us  to  the  love  of  which  we  must  say, 
in  Professor  Seeberg's  word,  that  it  cannot  become 
anything  to  anyone  without  becoming  his  all. 

Of  the  relation  of  God  to  our  individuality  we  have 
to  say,  then,  at  least  two  things.  First,  God  is  crea- 
tively immanent  in  the  soul  of  man ;  it  is  only  through 
such  immanence  of  God  in  man  that  man  is  capable 
of  experience — capable  of  science,  of  morality,  of  reli- 
gion— at  all.  Human  nature  knows  itself  as  having 
a  life  of  its  own.  But  when  we  ask  how  such  a  life 
can  be,  we  have  to  answer  that  it  is  a  life  divinely 
communicated.  It  is  only  through  continuous  self- 
communication  on  the  part  of  God,  only  through  an 
immanent  presence  of  God  to  man  involved  in  such 
self-communication,  that  human  nature  is  capable 
either  of  the  ideals  which  represent  to  it  its  own  pos- 
sibilities, or  of  the  free  energies  in  the  exercise  of 
which  those  possibilities  can  be,  and  frequently  are, 
progressively  realised.  But  in  saying  this  we  must 
remember  what  the  immanence  of  an  absolute  and 
eternal  spiritual  principle  in  a  race  and  a  history  of 
developing  individuals  means.  To  be  immanent  in 
humanity  and  its  history  God  must  also  be  tran- 
scendent. The  principle  which  is  immanent  without 
being  transcendent,   is   not   immanent   at   all,   but    is 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT        141 

merely  identical  with  the  thing  in  which  it  is  said  to 
be  immanent.  Secondly,  the  immanence  of  the  abso- 
lute principle  in  man,  so  far  from  destroying  man's 
freedom  and  individuality,  is  the  basis  and  the  only 
possible  basis  upon  which  man  can  have  genuine  indi- 
viduality and  freedom  at  all.  To  put  it  in  the  ancient 
language  of  religious  confession,  it  is  only  an  inner 
and  continual  fountain  of  divine  inspiration  that 
makes  man  capable  of  his  human  labours.  By  the 
continual  breath  of  God  we  have  our  being;  the  spirit 
of  God  is  the  source  and  the  sustaining  power  of  the 
individuality  of  man  and  of  that  freedom  which  is  at 
once  the  greatness  of  man  and  his  peril.  As  the  wise 
Stoic  and  the  great  Apostle  alike  saw,  in  God  we  live 
and  move  and  have  our  being.  And  to  have  our 
being  in  God  means  that  we  are  capable  not  alone  of 
that  poor  freedom  in  which  a  man  does  as  he  pleases ; 
not  alone  of  that  poor  individuality  in  which  he  cuts 
himself  off  from  the  great  interests  of  the  world  and 
the  common  reason  of  man;  but  rather  of  an  indi- 
viduality and  a  freedom  which,  by  the  very  source 
and  conditions  of  their  existence,  have  before  them  a 
divine  way,  a  divine  hope,  an  inheritance  of  the  nature 
of  God. 

So  far,  then,  for  such  answer  as  it  seems  possible 
for  reflective  reason  to  give  to  this  central  and  critical 
question  of  the  relation  of  God  to  the  human  indi- 
viduality which  apart  from  some  reproductive  or  self- 
communicating  activity  on  the  part  of  God  would  be 


143    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

nothing  at  all.  It  is  an  answer  which  proceeds  from 
the  recognition  of  a  certain  matter  of  fact;  the  fact 
that  Dinge  sind  Gcdanken,  Gedanken  sind  Dinge. 
That  is,  to  broaden  the  formula  into  its  more  accurate 
statement,  reality  is  a  spiritual  process ;  a  process 
intellectual,  artistic,  moral,  religious ;  the  concrete 
process  of  conscious  life.  And  things,  facts,  events, 
are  elements  and  factors  in  that  process ;  the  laws 
of  things,  the  "order  of  nature,"  being  the  law  and 
order,  or  part  of  the  law  and  order,  of  that  single 
process  of  spiritual  life.  And  the  only  way  that  we 
can  find  of  making  intelligible  to  ourselves  such  a 
spiritual  life  as  individualised  and  gradually  develop- 
ing in  us,  is  by  supposing  that  there  is  an  Absolute 
Experience,  in  which  also,  in  the  deep  sense  just 
noted,  Dinge  sind  Gedanken,  Gedanken  sind  Dinge; 
that  the  subject  of  that  Absolute  Experience,  grad- 
ually and  under  limitations  com.municates  Himself  as 
the  soul  of  man ;  that  therefore,  and  only  therefore, 
the  soul  of  man  is  able  in  its  own  freedom  and  by  its 
own  energies  to  enter,  how  gradually  soever  and  with 
whatever  struggle,  into  the  experience  which  to  God 
is  complete  and  therefore  eternal. 

This  view  can  be  stated,  and  has  been  stated,  in 
widely  different  ways ;  ways  which  seem  opposed  to 
one  another,  but  whose  agreement  is  really  profound 
and  essential.  And  one  of  these  ways  I  wish  to  notice 
in  passing.  Earlier  in  the  lecture,  we  had  to  ask. 
What  is  a  potentiality?  That  question  is  important  for 
this  reason.    Men  sometimes  impatiently  say,  A  poten- 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT        143 

tiality  is  just  nothing  at  all — a  mere  word.  And  by 
saying  that,  they  destroy  the  continuity  of  human 
experience  as  a  process  of  development.  For  if  a 
potentiality  is  merely  nothing  at  all,  then,  in  a  process 
of  development,  each  increment  of  reality  is  some- 
thing absolutely  new,  something  that  has  absolutely 
no  connexion  with  what  went  before,  but  is,  if  one 
may  so  speak,  just  loaded  discontinuously  on  top. 
The  whole  idea  of  development  in  general,  and  of  the 
continuity  of  developing  human  experience  in  particu- 
lar, is  made  meaningless.  But  the  view  already  stated 
involves  at  once  an  answer — or  rather  it  is  an 
answer — to  the  question  what  a  potentiality  is.  Some- 
thing can  be  potential  to  me  in  the  sense  that  that 
something  has  an  eternal  basis,  or  source,  of  its  being 
in  God,  and  that  I,  in  virtue  of  my  origin  through  a 
self-communication  on  the  part  of  God,  have  the 
gradual  attainment  of  that  something  within  the  capa- 
bilities of  my  spirit ;  an  attainment  of  it  which  is  not 
a  mere  giving  of  it  to  me  from  without,  but  is  the 
unfolding  (it  may  very  well  be,  in  response  to  external 
influences)  of  something  which  was  an  essential  part 
of  my  nature  from  the  time  that  I  had  a  nature  at 
all.  For  instance,  as  I  pointed  out  a  moment  ago,  we 
are  able,  in  scientific  work  continually  to  organise  that 
comparatively  unorganised  continuum  which  is  the 
"given"  of  experience,  because  in  the  first  place,  for 
God  it  is  not  unorganised  but  is  eternally  an  intelli- 
gible world;  and  because,  in  the  second  place,  we  in 
virtue  of  our  divine  origin  have  as  the  very  nature  of 


144    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

our  intelligence  operative  conceptions  and  categories 
that  set  us  continually  upon  that  work  of  scientific 
organisation.  And  thus  it  is  that  on  all  its  many  sides 
human  nature  can  be  said  through  its  divine  origin 
to  have  potentialities  and  to  have  laid  upon  it  the 
vocation  of  realising  those  potentialities;  a  realisation 
the  achieving  of  which  purely  for  man's  sake  is 
morality ;  but  the  achieving  of  which  in  devotion  to 
the  purpose  of  God — the  achieving  of  it  for  God's 
sake  as  well  as  man's — is  religion. 

This  insight  that  in  the  effort  after  knowledge  and 
after  good  we  are  trying  to  put  ourselves  at  the  point 
of  view  of  the  absolute  principle  of  reality,  and  thus 
to  build  up  in  humanity  an  eternal  consciousness  and 
an  eternal  life ;  and  this  theory  that  what  makes  us 
capable  of  such  an  endeavour  and  of  a  progressive 
success  in  it,  is  a  self-communication  on  the  part  of 
that  absolute  principle  itself  in  and  as  the  human 
soul ; — this  insight  and  this  theory  are  both  very 
ancient.  The  first  great  and  splendid  expression  of 
them  is  in  that  foresketch  and  prophecy  of  the  whole 
movement  of  Idealistic  thought  whether  ancient  or 
modern,  the  Platonic  doctrine  of  Reminiscence.  The 
self-organising  or  self-determining  process  of  our  expe- 
rience— the  growth  of  mankind  in  the  truth  which  is  at 
once  truth  of  science  and  truth  of  practice — is  the  com- 
ing to  consciousness  and  to  conscious  realisation,  upon 
the  occasion  of  earthly  stimuli,  of  an  absolute  prin- 
ciple and  an  absolute  knowledge  latent  in  us;  latent 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT        145 

in  us,  because,  by  a  human  birth  which  is  "a  sleep 
and  a  forgetting,"  we  come  hither  from  our  true 
home,  the  world  of  absolute  being.  There  is  no  need 
to  speak  of  translating  the  myth  into  philosophy;  the 
majestic  imagery  trembles  already  on  the  edge  of 
science,  and  bears  its  meaning  in  its  face.  Our  growth 
in  true  being,  Plato  would  say — our  growth  in  science 
and  in  all  the  manifold  realisation  of  the  good  in  a 
righteous  order  of  individual  and  social  life — means 
that  we,  in  our  individuality,  are  organic  parts  of  an 
eternal  and  absolute  order,  and  that  gradually  (in 
different  measures,  according  to  our  devotion  or  lack 
of  it)  we  come  to  possess  ourselves  as  such.  Into 
that  possession,  in  its  abstractly  intellectual  aspect,  we 
more  and  more  enter  in  the  sciences,  or  earthly  begin- 
nings of  sciences,  in  which  we  seek  to  know  reality 
as  it  truly  or  objectively,  completely  or  eternally,  is. 
In  the  practical  life,  which  includes  the  intellect  and 
everything  else,  we  move  toward  that  possession  in 
the  arts,  the  morality,  the  religion,  in  which  we  seek 
to  put  ourselves  at  the  point  of  view  of  the  eternal 
whole  so  that  through  our  wills  and  energies  its  crea- 
tive principle  may  accomplish  itself  and  work  its 
works,  and  thus  each  of  us  human  individuals  may  fill 
his  own  special  place  and  discharge  his  own  special 
function  in  the  one  total  order  which  is  to  itself  eter- 
nity but  to  us  men  the  history  of  the  world.  Our 
knowledge,  then — to  confine  ourselves  for  a  moment 
to  that — is  an  eternal  and  absolute  order  gradually 
reproducing   itself   in   and   as   our   individual   minds, 


146    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

which  are  themselves  parts  of  that  eternal  order;  so 
that  our  objective  consciousness  is  in  the  deepest  sense 
self-consciousness.  Plato  sees  most  clearly — this  in 
fact  is  the  precise  insight  which  makes  him  call  our 
knowledge  reminiscence — that  the  gradual  reproduc- 
tion of  the  eternal  order  in  our  knowledge,  its  gradual 
bringing  itself  to  human  consciousness  in  us,  is  no 
external  or  mechanical  process.  It  is  just  the  oppo- 
site of  mechanical  or  external.  It  takes  place  by  the 
impartation  of  inner  energies  which  exert  and  realise, 
which  unfold  and  manifest,  themselves  in  response  to 
"external"  stimuli. 

It  is  carrying  this  but  one  step  farther  to  point  out 
that  such  impartation  can  mean  nothing  other  than  a 
life  communicating  itself  as  a  life;  nothing  other  than 
that  a  single  supreme  principle,  in  whose  continuous 
creative  activity  the  real  world  has  its  being,  repro- 
duces itself  as  the  human  soul,  and  in  the  reproduc- 
tion retains  certain  at  least  of  the  essential  character- 
istics which  it  has  as  the  creator  and  sustainer  of  the 
world,  and  as  the  source  and  home  and  realisation  of 
all  truth  and  goodness ;  and  thus  makes  possible  to  us 
both  our  idea  of,  and  our  interest  in,  truth  and  good- 
ness and  the  union  of  ourselves  in  thought  and  affec- 
tion with  their  creative  principle;  makes  us  capable, 
that  is  to  say,  of  science,  of  morality,  of  religion. 
And  when  we  call  that  supreme  creative  principle  of 
the  real  world,  not  the  Idea  of  Good  as  Plato  at  first 
called  it,  nor  simply  "mind,  which  is  king  of  heaven 
and  earth  and  orders  all  things,"  but  the  Father  of 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT        147 

our  spirits,  the  Absolute  Spirit,  whose  character  is 
the  concrete  Good,  whose  consciousness  is  the  con- 
crete system  of  truth,  and  in  communion  with  whom 
hes  all  the  hope  of  the  humanity  which  lives  and  moves 
and  has  its  being  in  Him ; — when  we  say  this  we  are 
not  departing  from  Plato,  but  are  making  explicit 
what  he  felt  and  saw,  but  could  express  only  in  terms 
of  prophecy  and  of  myth.  It  was  only,  however, 
through  a  long  and  most  complicated  history,  only 
through  many  great  interpreters  and  in  many  great 
movements  of  life  and  science,  that  the  view  of  the 
relation  of  God  to  our  experience  and  our  experienced 
world,  implied  in  the  Platonic  suggestion,  was  grad- 
ually wrought  out.  At  the  very  beginning  of  that 
history,  the  Platonic  insight  took  in  Aristotle  another 
form;  if  indeed  Aristotle's  work  ought  not  to  be  taken 
as  constituting  along  with  Plato's  a  single  movement; 
for  while  Aristotle  transposed  Plato's  philosophy  into 
the  key  of  a  different  temper,  and  enlarged  it  with  a 
wealth  of  empirical  material — empirical  material  illu- 
minated and  systematised  by  the  idea  of  development — 
yet  he  altered  neither  its  essential  problems,  nor  its 
essential  positions,  nor  its  essential  difficulties.  In 
Aristotle  the  myth  has  become  science ;  the  doctrine 
of  Reminiscence  appears  as  a  doctrine  of  Active  and 
Passive  Reason.  Human  individuality,  finite  and  de- 
veloping human  experience,  is  seen  to  involve  both 
the  absolute  and  the  relative;  or  rather,  to  involve 
the  presence  of  a  reason  eternal  and  absolute — 
Creative  Reason — in  order  that  there  may  be  the  pos- 


148    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

sibility  at  all  of  any  "relative"  or  "finite"  human  expe- 
rience which  could  know  itself  to  be  such.  The  spirit 
of  man  is  capable  of  science  because  of  the  presence 
in  human  nature  of  the  Absolute  or  Creative  Reason 
which  "makes  all  things" ;  but  human  nature  as  an 
individual  growth  in  time — human  nature  with  the 
emphasis  not  upon  the  absoluteness  and  eternity  of 
the  object  of  science,  but  upon  the  gradual  movement 
from  Potentiality  to  Actuality  in  the  bringing  by  us 
of  that  absolute  content  to  consciousness — is  the  Pas- 
sive Reason  which  "becomes  all  things."  The  rational 
personality  of  man,  and  the  gradual  development  of 
that  personality  in  time  and  through  experiences  of 
sense,  is,  in  fact,  the  individualising  of  the  absolute 
principle — Active  Reason — in  and  through  Passive 
Reason.  Or,  to  put  it  the  other  way,  it  is  the  progres- 
sive determination  of  Passive  Reason  by  Active  Rea- 
son; the  realisation  (as  a  modern  Idealist,  setting 
aside  Aristotle's  doctrine  of  an  irrational  or  contin- 
gent matter  in  sense  and  the  sense-world,  would  say) 
of  spiritual  freedom  in  and  through  a  material  which 
at  first  presents  itself  under  an  alien  aspect  of  neces- 
sity. 

But  at  last  the  ancient  insights  passed  on  to  the 
men  of  another  world ;  a  world  in  which  was  operating 
a  personal  presence  that  removed  from  civilisation  none 
of  its  great  human  and  natural  factors,  and  yet  made 
all  things  new ;  the  presence  of  One  who  through  the 
gathering  centuries  was  so  revealing  God  as  to  fill 
religion  with  intense  and  personal  aflfections,  bringing 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT        149 

God  near  and  by  that  very  fact  making  man's  vision 
of  evil  a  vision  still  more  appalling  than  that  which 
weighed  down  the  heart  of  Plato  and  broke  the  unity 
of  his  view  of  the  world.  The  Christianised  thought  of 
East  and  West,  not  by  deliberate  intention  but  because 
human  nature  is  human  nature,  received  into  itself 
the  Greek  insights ;  but  it  received  them  into  an  expe- 
rience of  more  searching  struggles  and  passions  than 
the  Hellene  knew,  and  so  came  at  last  to  see  them  in 
their  greater  truth.  To  the  doctrinal  theology  of  to-day 
that  long  and  complicated,  that  profound  and  most 
instructive  history  should  be  present  as  at  once  the 
background  and  the  perspective  of  its  thought;  such 
a  presence  of  it  would  have  saved  many  a  cruel  mis- 
understanding, many  a  bitter  contention.  It  is  hard 
to  turn  away  from  it  here;  but  turn  away  from  it  we 
must,  and  come  at  once  to  another  consideration;  one 
only  in  the  light  of  which  does  the  view  so  far  pre- 
sented to-day,  appear  in  its  proper  significance. 

But  to  state  this  fairly,  I  must  remind  you  of  our 
procedure  so  far.  The  question  before  us  is  whether, 
in  building  itself  upon  the  Christian  view  of  the  world, 
human  nature  as  at  once  religious  and  rational  is  at 
unity  with  itself ;  or  whether  the  man  who  would  be 
faithful  to  reason  with  its  sciences,  and  who  yet  would 
organise  his  life  according  to  Christianity,  is  doomed 
to  hopeless  war  within  his  own  soul.  Hence,  after 
having  attempted  yesterday  to  bring  before  our  minds 
the  Christian  apprehension  of  the  reality  of  the  world, 
we  turned  to-day  to  our  rational  consciousness  to  con- 


150    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

sider  its  apprehension  of  that  same  reality  of  things. 
What  we  had  to  do  was  to  ask  after  the  conditions  of 
the  possibility  of  our  experience.  We  had  to  begin, 
that  is  to  say,  with  certain  things  of  our  own,  things 
that  are  our  life ;— our  labour,  our  science,  our  free- 
dom, our  individuality  and  all  its  struggle  and  growth 
in  possessing  itself — in  a  word,  all  this  development 
of  spiritual  capacities  which  is  the  history  of  civili- 
sation and  of  its  institutions.  With  these  things  we 
began  to-day,  and  asked  how  such  things  are  possible. 
In  answer  to  that  question  it  was,  that  we  came  to  the 
belief  in  an  Absolute  Spirit  whose  continuous  self- 
originating  activity  is  the  source  of  that  spiritual  his- 
tory which  is  the  world  of  our  experience ;  came  to 
the  belief  in  a  God  who  reproduces  Himself  in  the 
soul  of  man,  and  so  makes  us  capable  of  certain  types 
of  spiritual  activity  such  that  a  communion  is  possible 
between  us  on  the  one  side  and  God  and  His  works 
on  the  other ;  and  in  that  communion,  further  commu- 
nication, gradual  or  sudden,  from  God ;  and  so  all  our 
growth  in  art  and  science,  in  truth  and  goodness,  in 
practical  mastery  of  nature  or  in  social  righteousness — 
all  our  growth  in  that  intercourse  of  men  with  one 
another,  with  nature,  with  God,  which  is  our  expe- 
rience in  its  present  actual  form  as  a  history  upon 
the  earth. 

But  when  we  have  thus  begun  with  our  own  expe- 
rience and  our  own  individuality  in  that  experience, 
and  have  come  to  a  belief  in  an  Absolute  Spirit  and  in 
a  certain  relation  between  that  Spirit  and  our  indi- 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT        151 

viduality — a  certain  relation  between  God  and  His 
created  world  of  nature  and  history — there  is  another 
step  before  us.  Or  rather,  if  I  may  so  put  it,  there  is 
before  us  the  attempt  to  view  the  whole  position  from 
its  own  centre  of  gravity;  to  view  it,  not  in  the  order 
of  discovery,  but  in  the  order  of  reality.  The  relation 
between  God  and  ourselves  in  which  we  have  come  to 
believe,  we  must  attempt  to  state  no  longer  from 
below,  but  from  above;  no  longer  from  our  side  but 
from  God's  side.  Until  we  attempt  to  do  that,  we 
have  not  done  all  we  can  to  bring  out  the  significance 
of  the  belief  to  which  we  have  been  led.  I  do  not  mean 
to  say  that  we  can  go  very  far  in  this.  But  if  the  belief 
to  which  we  have  come  has  in  it  any  truth  or  signifi- 
cance at  all,  some  distance  we  must  be  able  to  go.  If 
we  begin  with  our  experience  and  become  convinced 
that  it  stands  in  such  and  such  a  relation  to  the  greater 
systematic  whole  of  reality  which  we  call  the  world, 
and  to  the  God  in  whose  supreme  and  creatively  organ- 
ising activity  the  world  has  its  being,  then  it  is  absurd 
for  us  to  say  that  the  relation  read  the  other  way — 
from  God  to  man — is  totally  unintelligible  to  us,  totally 
beyond  our  thought.  If  the  relation  as  from  God  to 
man  is  absolutely  unintelligible  to  us,  then  the  relation 
as  from  man  to  God  cannot  have  meant  anything  to 
us  either.  So  that  if  the  view  now  in  question  has  any 
significance  for  us  when  taken  from  our  side,  it  must 
also  have  significance  for  us  when  we  attempt  to  read 
it  from  God's  side.  And  one  point  at  least  in  that 
significance — a  point  already  indicated,  but  only  in  a 


152    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

passing  sentence — is  clear:  we  must  think  of  God  as 
seeking  a  realisation  of  Himself  in  us ;  must  think  that 
in  the  whole  of  our  life  it  is  our  business  to  make  our- 
selves the  organs  of  His  fulfilment  and  realisation  of 
Himself.  For  it  is  in  God's  energising  that  we  have 
life  and  being,  and  that  all  spiritual  history  is  made 
possible;  and  God's  energising  is  not  external  to  His 
nature — it  is  His  self-realisation.  The  ancient  insight 
which  to  the  Stoic  was  a  living  and  commanding  truth, 
but  to  the  great  Apostle  was  a  truth  still  more  living 
and  commanding,  because  filled  with  a  more  intensely 
personal  content — the  ancient  insight  that  we  live  and 
move  and  have  our  being  in  God,  means  not  only  that 
we  are  to  explain  our  being  by  reference  to  God  but 
also  that  God  lives  part  of  His  life  in  us,  and  seeks  in 
us  a  fulfilment  of  Himself.  In  that  sense  our  lives, 
with  the  very  freedom  and  the  partial  independence 
which  we  have  through  our  divine  origin,  are  factors 
in  God's  life. 

But  with  this  let  me  turn  back  as  sharply  and  ab- 
ruptly as  possible  to  yesterday's  discussion.  What  we 
have  just  seen  as  the  conclusion  of  reason,  when  it 
seeks  to  make  intelligible  to  itself  the  experience  which 
it  has  in  and  as  the  history  of  mankind,  is  precisely 
the  same  view  of  the  reality  of  things  that  is  implied 
in  the  devotion  and  the  faith  which  are  the  Christian 
consciousness.  That  God  is  seeking  to  fulfil  Himself 
in  us,  and  that  it  is  the  vocation  of  man  so  to  devote 
himself  to  God  that  God  may  have  in  our  growing 
and  deepening  personality  an  organ  of  His  purpose 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT        153 

and  a  place  of  His  fulfilment  of  Himself; — this,  as  a 
matter  of  practice,  a  matter  of  action  and  affection, 
is,  as  we  saw  yesterday,  the  essence  and  vital  nerve 
of  the  religious  consciousness.  When  religion  is  able 
to  express  itself,  when  it  lives  in  men  who  can  give  it 
an  articulate  voice — let  me  so  put  it,  in  order  to  convey 
no  suggestion  of  the  detestable  idea  that  there  is  in 
religion  a  natural  aristocracy  of  those  who  have  a 
special  genius  for  it,  or  that  there  can  be  anything 
higher  than  the  religion  of  the  unnumbered  thousands 
who  in  great  simplicity  love  God  and  in  that  love  do 
with  patient  hands  the  labours  of  the  common  day — 
when  religion  is  able  to  express  itself,  what  it  expresses 
is  such  devotion  to  God  and  to  His  fulfilment  of  Him- 
self in  us  and  in  all  our  civilisation.  Sometimes  this 
is  expressed  in  the  language  of  reflexion,  but  more 
often  and  more  naturally  in  the  passionate  language 
of  devotion ;  and,  deeper  than  all  expression,  it  is  the 
heart  of  the  religious  consciousness.  Expressed  or 
unexpressed,  reflected  upon  or  no,  it  is  essentially 
what  religion  means  when  religion  is  at  its  deepest 
and  purest.  Religion  means  the  apprehending  of  our- 
selves and  of  the  world  from  God's  point  of  view ;  an 
apprehension  which  is  primarily  one  of  love  and  of 
action,  though  late  or  soon  the  action  and  the  love 
form  within  themselves  a  soul  of  thought.  We  appre- 
hend God  as  seeking  to  fulfil  a  purpose  in  our  indi- 
vidual lives  and  in  the  collective  life  of  humanity;  a 
purpose  which  is  not  external  or  accidental  to  Him, 
is  not  any  arbitrary  decree,  but  expresses  His  very 


154    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

nature ;  and  to  that  purpose  we  devote  ourselves.  The 
attempt  practically  to  take  God's  point  of  view,  the 
attempt  practically  to  view  our  life  and  all  the  history 
of  the  universe  as  that  in  which  God  seeks  to  fulfil 
Himself ; — this  is  religion.  Only  as  we  come  to  it  in 
practice  are  we  religious  men  at  all ;  only  as  we  come 
to  it  in  reflexion — in  theology  and  philosophy — do  we 
grasp  at  all  the  nature  of  religion.  As  we  saw  yes- 
terday, it  is  only  this  devotion  to  God's  point  of  view 
that  lifts  the  religious  man  above  mere  moralism. 
Turn  to  the  Christian  consciousness,  whether  as  it 
lives  in  all  our  hearts  seeking  to  make  us  more  and 
more  its  own,  or  as  it  has  uttered  itself — so  far  as  in 
words  it  can  utter  itself— in  its  own  great  confessional 
literature.  Alike  in  the  New  Testament  and  in  the 
later  devotional  writings  of  Christianity,  in  those  in- 
tense expressions  in  which  religion  rises  to  the  true 
form  of  its  own  idea  and  possesses  all  the  field,  what 
we  find  everywhere  is  some  variation  or  other  of  the 
one  central  theme  which  is  to  religion  its  very  breath 
of  life:  not  we,  Christ  in  us;  God  working  in  us,  both 
to  will  and  to  work,  for  his  good  pleasure. 

Yesterday,  then,  beginning  with  religion,  in  that 
high  and  intense  form  of  it  with  which  in  Christian 
theology  we  are  concerned,  we  found  it  to  consist  in 
a  practical  consciousness  of  an  absolute  principle;  a 
giving  of  ourselves,  in  love  and  faith,  to  be  the  finite 
dwelling-places  of  that  principle,  the  place  of  its  self- 
realisation,  the  organs  of  its  eternal  purpose;  man's 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT        155 

effort,  in  a  word,  to  make  his  total  experience,  his 
total  being  and  doing,  a  life  in  which  God  can  have  a 
fulfilment  of  His  purpose — which  is  to  say,  a  fulfil- 
ment of  Himself.  To-day,  trying  to  make  human 
experience  rationally  intelligible  to  ourselves,  we  have 
been  brought  at  last  to  the  same  point  of  view.  When 
we  ask  what  human  experience  really  is,  we  have  at 
last  to  answer :  it  is  a  process,  apparently  infinite,  in 
which  God  is  seeking  a  fulfilment  of  Himself.  So  that 
it  is  only  in  being  religious,  only  in  making  his  whole 
conduct  a  work  of  the  love  of  God,  that  a  man  is,  in 
the  deliberate  purpose  of  his  life,  in  cxccord  with 
reality.  Religion  is  the  most  rational  of  all  things; 
or  rather  it  is  that  in  which  all  rationality  is  summed 
up  and  included.  And  if  there  be  degrees  in  reality, 
religion  is  the  most  real  of  all  things;  it  is  that  in 
which  reality  rises  in  man  to  the  true  form  of  its  idea. 
This,  I  think,  is  all  that  need  be  said  about  the  bearing 
of  to-day's  discussion  upon  the  general  question  before 
us,  the  question  whether,  in  the  Christian  conscious- 
ness, the  religious  and  rational  spirit  of  man  is  in 
essential  unity  with  itself  or  in  hopeless  division; 
save  that  I  should  ask  you  to  remember  that  what 
has  come  before  us  to-day  is  only  a  general  thesis 
which  in  the  lectures  that  follow  is  to  be  further  articu- 
lated. But  to  a  special  aspect  of  what  has  just  been 
before  us,  a  moment  longer  must  be  given.  One  of 
the  most  cruel  of  the  necessities  which  lie  upon  the 
theologian  is  that  of  defending  the  very  essence  of  the 
religious  consciousness  against  the  attacks  of  religious 


156    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

men  who  apprehend  too  hastily  the  nature  of  their 
own  rehgion.  Such  men  with  the  best  of  intentions 
frequently  inflict  upon  religion  a  mortal  wound.  They 
see — see  rightly — that  without  a  freedom  and  respon- 
sibility on  the  part  of  man,  religion,  except  as  the 
slave's  devout  acceptance  of  his  chain,  withers  away. 
But  in  the  haste  of  their  thought  they  so  assert  the 
freedom  of  man  as  virtually  to  dethrone  God.  And 
there  can  be  no  deadlier  wound  to  religion  than  that. 
Half-gods  may  be  our  companions ;  they  cannot  be 
the  master  light  of  our  seeing,  cannot  be  the  object  of 
our  worship  and  of  our  ultimate  trust.  To  remove 
God  from  the  throne  of  His  universe  is  to  remove 
Him  from  His  place  as  the  supreme  object  of  love 
and  faith.  The  vital  nerve  of  religion  is  severed,  the 
principle  of  its  permanent  life  destroyed.  God  be- 
comes one  of  ourselves  in  the  wrong  sense;  becomes 
one  of  ourselves,  warring  with  stronger  and  cleaner 
hands  than  we,  but  still  a  finite  being  along  with  us  in 
the  one  great  world ;  and  the  heart  of  man  goes  search- 
ing out  into  the  dark  for  that  Supreme  which  is  the 
Overlord  both  of  this  finite  God  and  of  ourselves. 
And  the  pity  of  it  is  that  this  sacrifice  in  the  name  of 
freedom  is  altogether  unnecessary.  So  far  from  being 
a  service  to  freedom,  it  is  a  profound  disservice  to  it. 
The  view  that  God  seeks  a  realisation  of  Himself  in 
us;  the  view  that  our  lives  are  factors  in  God's  life, 
in  the  sense  that  He  seeks  in  us  the  place  of  a  fulfil- 
ment of  Himself,  so  that  it  is  only  as  we  give  our- 
selves to  Him  to  be  the  organs  of  His  purpose,  that 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT        157 

either  He  is  fulfilled  or  we  come  to  be  truly  our- 
selves ; — this  does  not  mean  that  human  freedom  and 
individuality  are  lost  in  God;  does  not  mean  that  our 
sense  of  individuality  and  freedom  is  illusory,  as  Pan- 
theism thinks,  and  that  really  we  are  modes  of  the 
divine  substance.  It  means  precisely  the  opposite. 
It  was  with  the  human  consciousness  of  individuality 
and  freedom  that  we  began,  and  we  were  compelled 
to  refer  to  an  Absolute  Spirit  in  order  to  explain  how 
such  a  thing  as  human  individuality  and  freedom — the 
freedom  of  a  being  who  is  not  self-creative  and  self- 
existent — is  possible  at  all.  There  is  no  difficulty  in 
conceiving  the  freedom  of  a  self-existent  spirit.  To 
conceive  it  as  self-existent  is  to  conceive  it  as  free; 
for  it  depends  upon  nothing  other  than  itself  for  either 
its  existence  or  its  action,  but  in  all  that  it  does,  it  acts 
from  itself.  On  the  other  hand,  it  is  a  difficulty  to 
conceive  the  freedom  of  a  being  who  is  not  self- 
existent  but  has  his  existence  from  some  higher 
source.  This  difficulty — the  difficulty,  in  other  words, 
of  reconciling  our  human  consciousness  of  depend- 
ence with  our  equally  acute  conscfousness  of  indi- 
viduality and  freedom — is,  in  fact,  the  centre  of  the 
problem  that  has  just  been  before  us,  and  is  precisely 
what  leads  us  to  think  of  an  Absolute,  and  therefore 
perfectly  free.  Spirit  communicating  in  some  way  his 
own  nature  and  thus  giving  rise  to  lesser  spirits  who 
are  at  least  potentially  free,  and  the  development  of 
whose  being  is  therefore  a  development  of  freedom. 
Furthermore  (to  mention  here  a  point  which  is  to  be 


158    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

discussed  more  fully  in  the  fourth  lecture)  if  God  is 
what  we  have  come  to  believe  He  must  be  in  order 
to  be  the  source  of  us  and  of  our  experienced  world — 
that  is  to  say,  a  being  altogether  free  and  spiritual,  the 
Absolute  Spirit — He  cannot  fulfil  Himself  in  a  pan- 
theistic world,  a  world  of  modes.  He  can  fulfil  Him- 
self only  in  communion.  And  communion  implies 
other  spirits  who  have  a  freedom,  and  therefore  an 
individuality,  which,  however  limited,  are  real  as  far 
as  they  go ;  and  are  capable,  by  exercising  themselves 
aright,  of  becoming  greater. 

The  statement,  then,  that  God  lives  some  part  of 
His  life  in  us,  does  not  mean  the  taking  away  of  human 
freedom.  It  does  mean  what  no  serious  theologian 
can  deny,  or  can  wish  to  deny :  that  God  is  in  some 
way  fulfilling  Himself  in  all  that  He  does ;  whether 
in  those  activities  of  His  that  we  call  Nature ;  or  in 
that  communication  of  Himself  wherein  He  gives  rise 
to  societies  of  lesser  spirits  and  makes  possible  all 
their  science,  all  their  arts,  all  their  moralities,  all 
their  histories  and  civilisations.  The  whole  order  and 
constitution  of  the  universe — the  Absolute  Idea — 
must  be  the  expression  and  forth-putting,  the  mani- 
festation and  self-fulfilment,  of  God,  the  Absolute 
Spirit.  God  must  be  related  to  His  universe,  not  in 
mere  externality,  not  in  mere  outside  superiority,  like 
an  artificer  to  a  material  object;  but  (to  use  a  word 
which  approaches  the  meaning  and  yet  is  far  from 
being  adequate)  organically,  in  the  sense  that  he  ex- 
presses His  own  nature,  and  realises  the  purposes  of 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT        159 

that  nature,  in  all  that  He  constitutes  and  creatively 
organises.  God,  in  any  of  His  actions,  is  never  less 
than  God.  His  whole  nature  is  brought  to  bear  in 
every  one  of  His  actions ;  or,  as  we  ought  rather  to 
say,  in  His  action  as  a  whole;  for  there  can  be  in  His 
activity  no  abstract  or  isolated  actions.  To  put  the 
same  thing  in  still  another  way,  there  is  one  divine 
experience  or  activity — an  activity  in  which  the  total 
or  collective  history  of  mankind  is  itself  an  organic 
part — and  in  that  whole  of  divine  activity  God  seeks 
the  fulfilment  of  Himself.  So  that,  to  recur  to  words 
already  used,  God  is  to  His  universe  at  once  trans- 
cendent and  immanent ;  related  to  the  universe  as 
thought  to  its  object,  and  as  a  moral  agent  to  his  own 
labours.  But  in  this  case  the  thought  is  absolute 
{i.e.  is  altogether  the  source  of  its  own  object)  ;  and 
the  moral  agent  is  one  who  can  reproduce  himself  and 
so  give  rise  to  other  spirits  who  in  the  measure  of 
their  being  are  also  moral  agents,  and  as  such  can 
stand  over  against  the  God  who  gave  them  life;  with 
the  consequence  (which  we  shall  have  to  consider 
later)  that  while  we  inevitably  must  believe  that  God 
created  them  in  order  to  fulfil  Himself  through  and 
in  them,  yet  He  can  so  fulfil  Himself  only  by  winning 
their  loyalty,  only  by  lifting  Himself  up  in  the  midst 
of  them  and  drawing  their  hearts  to  Him,  reconciling 
them  to  Himself. 

It  is  necessary  to  clear  up  this  point  with  special 
care,  not  only  on  account  of  its  intrinsic  and  central 
importance,  but  also  because  a  certain  widely  spread 


160    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

type  of  mind  revolts  almost  instinctively  against  such 
a  view  of  the  relation  of  God  to  the  spirit  of  man  and 
to  the  world  in  which  the  spirit  of  man  has  its  life. 
That  type  of  mind  has  shown  occasionally  a  great 
robustness  of  moral  manhood;  it  has  done  in  this 
world  a  good  deal  of  solid  work,  both  of  construction 
and  of  clear-headed  reform.  Yet  in  the  main  it  is  not 
attractive;  of  itself  it  would  secure  little  hold  upon 
deeply  religious  men.  But  it  gains  immense  power  by 
seizing  upon,  and  turning  into  a  wrong  course,  some- 
thing which  lies  at  the  root  of  Christian  experience. 
It  seizes  upon  that  profound  and  continual  sense  of 
our  own  sinfulness  and  of  the  world's  evil,  apart  from 
which  there  is  no  Christian  experience  at  all;  apart 
from  which,  at  any  rate,  Christianity  is  a  beautiful  and 
innocent  flower,  hidden  in  sheltered  places,  rather  than 
a  great  and  revolutionary  and  world-mastering  reli- 
gion; and  by  this  it  draws  religious  men,  who  could 
not  otherwise  be  so  misled,  away  from  the  Christian 
view  of  a  God,  the  Father  of  our  spirits,  who  is  seeking 
to  save  us  from  our  sin,  to  the  un-Christian  view  of  a 
God  who  has  no  intimate  relation  with  the  world  of 
our  human  affairs  at  all,  save  that  once  He  made  it, 
and  sometime  will  come  to  judge  it  and,  if  need  be, 
to  unmake  it  as  an  experiment  that  has  failed.  This 
type  of  mind  has  assumed  two  chief  forms.  The  one 
admits  into  our  life  the  question  of  its  divine  relation- 
ships, but  admits  this  question  as  little  as  possible ;  the 
other  does  not  admit  it  at  all.  The  former  is  seen  in 
the  hard  good  sense  of  Deism ;  the  hard  good  sense 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT        161 

which  wishes  to  keep  at  as  great  a  distance  as  possible 
the  consuming  presence  and  the  consuming  love  of 
God,  and  those  profound  and  world-overturning  pas- 
sions which  arise  in  the  soul  of  man  in  its  conscious- 
ness of  such  a  presence.  To  such  a  view  as  here  has 
been  in  question,  a  mind  of  this  temper  is  apt  to  apply 
its  term  of  deepest  reproach — Mysticism;  although 
such  a  view  is  mystical  only  in  the  sense  in  which 
Mysticism  lies  inevitably  in  the  very  nature  of  reli- 
gion as  our  attempt  to  relate  ourselves  to  what  is  higher 
then  we;  and  God,  precisely  in  being  the  Father  of 
our  spirits  is  immeasurably  higher  than  we.  This  hard 
common  sense  of  Deism,  logical  yet  unthoughtful,  is 
present  in  many  quarters  where  its  name  is  warmly 
repudiated;  present  sometimes  by  native  tendency  of 
mind ;  but  sometimes  through  sheer  haste ;  men  are  so 
eager  to  defend  religion  (not  to  speak  at  all  of  secta- 
rian theologies)  that  they  give  themselves  no  time  to 
apprehend  the  true  and  deep  nature  of  religion,  no 
time  for  the  length  and  stillness  and  depth  of  medita- 
tion apart  from  which  even  the  beginnings  of  an  ade- 
quate reflective  apprehension  of  the  nature  of  reli- 
gion are  not  possible.  Then,  secondly,  this  instinctive 
turn  of  mind  shows  itself  in  what  for  want  of  some 
better  word  may  be  called  moralism;  the  mind  to 
which  morality  in  its  abstract  sense  is  enough.  By 
abstract  morality  I  mean  the  morality  which,  while  it 
may  be  altogether  sincere  and  hard-working,  will  know 
nothing  of  religion  and  the  passions  of  religion;  and 
so  takes  man  as  less  than  he  really  is;  takes  him  in 


162    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

his  present  empirical  interests,  but  refuses  to  con- 
sider the  eternal  being,  the  divine  relations,  of  those 
interests : — a  morality  which  is  a  good  thing,  but  does 
not  know  that  it  is  a  good  thing  incomplete  and  calling 
out  for  something  more  than  itself  in  order  that  it 
may  itself  be  fulfilled.  To  such  moralism,  the  free- 
dom and  self-activity  of  man,  as  it  is  the  first  thing, 
is  also  the  last  thing;  duty  is  known,  but  not  grace. 
But  what  enables  religion  to  take  such  morality  up 
into  itself,  and  pass  onward  to  something  still  deeper, 
is  the  fact  that  religion  is  the  passionate  giving  of 
one's  self  to  God,  hoping,  praying,  yearning  that  God 
will  live  in  us,  so  that  we  may  become  the  organs  of 
His  purpose,  and  He  in  and  through  us  may  fulfil  Him- 
self, living  in  our  myriad  individual  lives  and  in  the 
total  life  of  humanity  some  part  of  His  divine  life. 
The  man  who  has  not  in  affection  and  devotion  reached 
this  point  of  view  has  not  reached  religion,  in  any 
high  form  of  it,  at  all;  but  the  man  who  has  reached 
it  knows  something  of  God  and  of  man,  of  God's 
grace  and  of  man's  true  freedom  and  self-realisation, 
compared  with  which  the  experience  and  the  vision 
of  the  merely  moral  man  are  thin  and  poor.  This  is 
the  very  centre  and  vital  nerve  of  religion ;  and  be- 
cause it  is  thus  central  and  vital  to  religion,  it  ought 
to  be  vital  and  central  to  theology.  In  such  a  matter 
we  cannot — we  must  not — shape  theology  timidly,  as 
though  religion  were  a  feeble  growth,  likely  to  be 
withered  by  the  first  breath  of  a  formula  not  our  own. 
Rather,  in  theology  as  in  religion,  let  our  souls  be  with 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT        163 

the  saints.  Let  us  mark  what  it  was  our  Lord  de- 
manded of  the  heart  of  man.  And  let  us  hear  Saint 
Paul;  let  us  hear  Augustine  in  his  better  part,  and 
Luther;  men  whose  striving  was  to  take  God's  point 
of  view ;  men  whose  passion  was  to  give  themselves 
to  God,  not  simply  that  God  may  in  the  narrow  sense 
fulfil  us  men  in  ourselves,  but  that  He  may  fulfil 
Himself  In  us. 

But  I  do  wrong  to  this  fundamental  faith  alike  of 
religion  and  of  reason — do  wrong  to  the  height  and 
the  serenity  that  even  in  its  ages  of  desperate  battle 
have  been  its  proper  air — in  presenting  it  in  this  de- 
fensive way.  Let  me  be  content  to  draw  out  one 
further  point  of  its  significance,  and  then  leave  it  to 
stand  in  its  own  strength  and  make  its  own  appeal. 
That  further  point  is  this.  If  the  time-process  of  our 
world  of  finite  individuals  is  in  some  real  sense  an 
experience  of  God  (one  cannot  say  roundly  the  expe- 
rience of  God — as  we  shall  see  in  the  last  lecture,  in 
order  to  make  that  time-process  itself  intelligible  to 
our  minds  we  need  the  help  of  the  profound  and  specu- 
lative oecumenical  idea  of  an  eternally  perfect  society 
in  God),  this  involves  the  view  that  the  suffering  of 
the  world,  the  long  agony  of  the  human  struggle,  is 
somehow  a  suflfering  of  God.  The  divine  existence 
cannot  be  that  absolute  and  untroubled  tranquillity  of 
blessedness  of  which  Aristotle  thought;  it  must  be  an 
existence  in  which  the  sorrows  of  humanity  are  pres- 
ent and  actual — present  in  harmony  with  all  that  is 
real  in  God,  and  yet  present  in  their  integrity  as  suf- 


164    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

fering.  This  thought  that  God  suffers  in  all  the  suf- 
fering of  the  created  universe,  has  often  come  to 
expression  among  theologians.  It  is  perhaps  the  most 
significant  of  all  the  ideas  that  have  had  place  in  man's 
long  effort  to  understand  the  world  of  his  life;  the 
effort  which,  viewed  from  the  lower  side,  is  that  of 
making  intelligible  to  ourselves  our  experience  and 
earthly  history,  but  viewed  on  its  upper  side  is  that 
of  justifying  the  ways  of  God  to  man.  And  I  am 
specially  concerned  to  emphasise  it  at  this  point,  be- 
cause in  the  fourth  lecture  where  it  should  have  place 
as  a  leading  principle,  I  shall  be  unable  to  do  more 
than  outline  in  the  briefest  way  an  argument  which, 
indeed,  implies  this  idea  throughout,  but  scarcely 
brings  it  to  formal  expression  in  either  of  its  great 
applications;  its  application  as  a  general  principle  of 
the  relation  of  God  to  the  world;  its  special  appli- 
cation to  the  Incarnation,  one  side  of  whose  meaning 
and  one  part  of  whose  function  is  certainly  expressed 
by  this  idea. 

So  far  for  our  work  to-day.  We  have  been  con- 
sidering the  everyday  experience  which  is  our  com- 
mon life;  the  everyday  experience  which  is  the  place 
and  the  potentiality  of  all  art,  of  all  science,  of  all 
morality,  of  all  religion.  We  have  come  to  believe 
that  it  is  a  process  in  which  God  seeks  a  realisation 
of  Himself;  so  that  the  many-sided  vocation  of  man 
is  rightly  performed  only  when  the  whole  of  life  is 
animated  from  within  by  the  spirit  and  the  devotion 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  SPIRIT        165 

of  religion.  Having  that  general  thesis  before  us, 
we  must  try  to  articulate  it  further.  That  is  to  say, 
we  must  take  up,  however  briefly,  each  of  the  large 
factors  in  the  process  with  which  we  have  been  con- 
cerned; the  process  which  we  possess  and  know  as 
our  own  life,  but  of  which  we  have  come  to  believe 
that  it  is  a  history  wherein  God  is  seeking  to  realise 
a  purpose  that  expresses  His  own  divine  character. 
In  the  third  lecture,  then,  I  am  to  speak  of  nature,  the 
arena  in  which,  and  the  medium  through  which,  man 
receives  his  spiritual  being;  in  the  fourth,  of  that  his- 
tory in  which  on  the  one  hand  man  asserts  and  exer- 
cises his  powers,  develops  his  being,  enters  upon  his 
freedom,  sins  his  sin,  and  on  the  other  hand  God 
meets  the  sin  of  man  by  the  grace  of  His  process  of 
redemption ;  a  redemption  which  means  a  new  birth 
and  a  new  life  to  every  interest  and  power  of  the 
spirit  of  man,  so  that  redemption  becomes  the  reality 
of  history  and  of  God's  making  of  man,  and  in  re- 
demption, along  with  God,  all  men  work  who  have 
taken  God's  purpose  as  their  own;  and  thus  there  is 
established  that  City  of  God  wherein,  in  the  love  of 
God,  every  energy  of  the  human  soul  is  exercised  to 
the  full  and  exercised  aright. 


Ill 

Nature 

In  the  preceding  lecture  it  was  our  business  to  put 
ourselves  at  the  point  of  view  of  the  rational  con- 
sciousness, and  to  consider  from  that  point  of  view 
the  meaning  of  our  life.  The  meaning  of  our  life; 
or,  if  one  will,  the  nature  of  the  world.  The  two 
expressions  come  ultimately  to  the  same  thing.  For 
the  world  is  not  merely  the  external  scene  of  our  life ; 
it  is  the  order  of  our  life,  the  system  of  conditions 
under  which  we  have  our  birth  and  our  continuance 
of  being;  it  (or  the  principle  creatively  active  in  it) 
is  at  once  the  object  and  the  determining  law  of 
our  labour,  our  art,  our  science,  our  morality,  our 
religion;  though  very  often  the  determination  is  ef- 
fected freely — that  is,  by  our  acceptance  of  the  law 
as  the  law  of  our  own  will.  The  belief  to  which  we 
came  was  that  what  makes  possible  our  experience 
and  history  upon  the  earth  is  an  activity  of  self-com- 
munication on  the  part  of  an  Absolute  Spirit;  the 
belief,  in  other  words,  that  the  order  of  the  world  is 
a  divine  idea — the  absolute  idea;  the  history  of  the 
world,  a  providential  course ;  the  supreme  law  of  the 
world,  a  divine  purpose.  With  such  a  general  view 
before  us,  we  have  next  to  work  out  somewhat  fur- 
ther its  meaning  and  articulation  by  considering  in 
greater  detail,  though  it  must  still  be  very  briefly,  the 


NATURE  167 

chief  factors  of  our  life.  The  most  convenient  order 
of  discussion  is  that  which  moves — I  will  not  say 
from  the  outer  to  the  inner,  for  those  terms  are  mis- 
leading unless  it  is  understood  that  the  outer  and  the 
inner  are  in  the  truth  of  things  correlative,  each  re- 
flecting its  own  life  and  purpose  and  glory  into  the 
other — but  from  the  natural  order  of  our  life  to  its 
acutely  conscious  spiritual  struggles.  By  nature  is 
meant  not  merely  the  visible  place  and  scene  of  our 
life,  but  all  that  system  of  forces  and  processes,  not  at 
first  sight  spiritual,  in  which  nevertheless  the  spirit 
of  man  has  its  birth,  its  growth,  and  all  its  upbuilding 
of  civilisation. 

To-day,  then,  it  is  with  the  view  of  nature  involved 
in  our  rational  consciousness  of  the  world,  that  we 
shall  be  occupied.  In  dealing  with  this,  I  shall  really 
be  concerned  with  a  single  point :  the  deep  and  essen- 
tial harmony  between  that  view  of  nature  and  the 
place  which  nature  takes  in  the  fully  developed  reli- 
gious consciousness.  Hence  it  is  best  to  turn  first  to 
the  religious  consciousness ;  it  goes  without  saying,  in 
its  Christian  form. 

In  this  we  must  be  careful  of  one  point ;  we  must 
not  take  for  granted  that  every  passionate  outburst 
of  the  Christian  heart  concerning  nature  is  to  be  re- 
ceived as  a  final  word.  As  was  just  indicated,  what 
we  must  have  in  mind  is  the  fully  developed  religious 
consciousness,  so  far  as  in  our  life  upon  the  earth 
there  is  such  a  thing.  We  must  look  to  the  deliberate 
attitude  and  conviction  of  the  Christian  mind  when, 


168    CHRISTIAN'  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

after  its  first  struggles,  it  has  come  to  tranquillity  of 
faith  and  deeply  and  clearly  can  do  justice  to  its  own 
organising  instincts  and  principles.  Christian  men,  in 
those  early  struggles  in  which  the  inclinations  of  the 
heart  seem  to  set  themselves  unyieldingly  against  the 
vocation  of  God,  often  are  driven  to  think  that  nature 
is  the  very  enemy  of  God.  Eventually  Christianity 
itself  overcomes  that  view ;  for  Christianity  is  an  appre- 
hension of  God,  and  in  its  apprehension  of  God  it  is 
the  antithesis  of  Manichaeism.  Nevertheless  it  fre- 
quently remains  the  case  that  religious  men,  struggling 
to  subdue  the  hard  material  of  our  life  to  the  love  of 
God,  do  not  rise  above  an  external  and  negative  atti- 
tude toward  nature  as  a  merely  physical  order  lying 
beyond  the  confines  of  religious  experience.  The 
Christian  consciousness  is  intrinsically  a  sense  of  per- 
sonal relationship;  and  the  man  to  whom  the  mainte- 
nance of  that  relation  means  a  struggle,  at  once  in  his 
own  soul  and  in  the  social  order  wherein  he  has  his 
life,  is  apt  to  be  satisfied  if  only  he  can  see  nature  as 
not  contradicting  too  visibly  his  religion.  His  own 
soul  with  its  evil,  the  social  order  in  its  unrighteous- 
ness ; — these  are  to  him  the  place  of  life  and  of  the 
decision  of  its  issues.  Nature  is  like  a  background, 
or  a  far-removed  circumference.  It  is  enough  that 
it  be  God's  workmanship  and  under  his  control ; 
enough  that  it  be  not  atheistic — coming  into  existence 
without  God,  maintaining  its  existence  without  God; 
enough  that  even  in  its  cruelties  and  disasters  it  be 
still   an  instrument   in  God's  hand,  unable  to   assert 


NATURE  169 

itself  against  its  maker  and  master;  enough  that  its 
magnificence  illustrate  God's  wisdom  and  power,  day 
unto  day  uttering  majestically,  but  not  in  intimacy 
with  the  heart  of  man,  its  speech.  But  that  cannot  be 
the  last  word.  Late  or  soon,  as  Christian  men  grad- 
ually enter  into  the  significance  of  their  own  religion 
and  consider  the  fulfilment  of  the  love  of  God  in  the 
experience  of  man,  the  position  implicit  in  those  nega- 
tives and  those  remote  recognitions  becomes  expressed 
in  positives.  For  in  the  first  place  religion  is  the  all- 
inclusive  unity  of  life ;  so  far  as  a  man  is  religious,  all 
his  experience  is  gathered  up  into  the  love  of  God. 
But  nature,  as  this  order  of  outward  fact,  mountain 
and  cloud  and  field  and  sky,  the  place  of  our  labour, 
the  place  of  our  contemplation ;  still  more,  as  these 
impulses  and  instincts,  rooted  deep  in  the  by- 
gone natural  histories  of  the  making  of  man,  and  now 
exerting  themselves  continually  and  with  power  in 
human  character; — nature,  as  all  this,  is  a  radical  fac- 
tor in  human  experience.  So  that  the  religious  mind 
as  a  mind  centred  in  the  idea  of  the  fulfilling  of  God's 
love  in  human  experience,  must  view  nature  also  as 
made  for  the  fulfilling  of  the  love  of  God.  To  the 
religious  mind,  nature  may  indeed  have  its  various 
special  uniformities,  and  it  may  indeed  be  the  indispu- 
table right  of  men  of  science  to  search  out  and  declare 
these.  Yet  the  supreme  law  of  nature,  the  law  which 
fulfils  itself  in  the  whole  of  nature  and  in  all  its  spe- 
cial uniformities,  must  be  the  love  of  God ;  the  love 
which,  in  being  perfect  love,  is  perfect  righteousness 


170    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

and  perfect  reason,  and  fulfils  itself  in  bringing  about 
in  man  and  man's  society  an  answering  love,  an  an- 
swering reason,  an  answering  righteousness.  In  the 
second  place,  the  religious  view  of  human  individ- 
uality which  we  have  already  had  to  consider — the 
view  of  human  individuality  short  of  which  we  can- 
not stop  in  practice  without  being  less  than  religious — 
applies  also  to  nature.  For  the  religious  man  the 
supreme  thing  is  that  God  fulfil  Himself.  Our  life 
reaches  its  true  form  and  being  when  we  have  given 
ourselves  to  be  the  organs  of  God's  purpose;  when 
our  life,  our  freedom,  our  individuality,  our  exertion 
of  manifold  forces,  our  re-making  of  the  world — all 
is  God  fulfilling  Himself  in  us.  Short  of  that  our 
very  devotion  to  human  welfare  is  not  religion,  but 
morality ;  and  morality  in  a  very  abstract  form ;  mo- 
rality occupied  with  the  fulfilment  of  human  nature 
apart  from  its  divine  relations — human  nature,  that 
is  to  say,  as  it  emphatically  is  not.  And  with  the 
necessary  changes  of  application  the  same  position  is 
involved  in  the  religious  consciousness,  with  regard 
to  nature.  Nature  must  be,  however  partially  or  in- 
adequately, God  fulfilling  Himself.  Whether  nature 
be  real  as  end  or  as  means — or  as  both,  in  the  sense 
of  being  an  organic  part  of  a  greater  whole — that  is 
what  its  reality  is;  God  fulfilling  Himself.  And  that 
being  the  case,  the  religious  man  finds  himself  called 
to  a  communion  with  nature  which  is  something  like 
a  lower  power  of  his  communion  with  God.  To  say 
that  the  Christian  man's  companionship  with  nature 


NATURE  171 

is  indirectly  a  walking  with  God,  his  communion  with 
nature  indirectly  a  communion  with  God,  is  to  under- 
state an  experience  which,  if  entered  upon  at  all,  be- 
comes one  inestimable  in  significance,  inestimable  in 
consolation  and  restorative  power.  It  is  immediate 
rather  than  indirect ;  in  nature  the  religious  man  ap- 
prehends directly  the  love  of  God  meeting  his  own; 
and  apprehends  it  as  clothing  itself  in  that  solemn 
power  and  beauty  which  has  but  to  be  itself  in  order 
to  be  loved,  and  is  for  its  own  sake  an  end  to  God  and 
to  man. 

The  characteristic  expression  of  this  for  modern 
men  came  through  a  mind  that  was  moved  pro- 
foundly— was  moved  and  governed — by  human  sym- 
pathies; and,  with  no  vehemence  of  passion  in  the 
religion,  was  yet  altogether  religious;  and  therefore 
was  all  the  greater  in  its  high  and  unmarred  poetic 
quality ; — the  mind  of  Wordsworth.  Upon  that,  how- 
ever, I  cannot  now  have  the  happiness  to  dwell.  But 
I  will  stop  to  point  out  that  the  earlier  and  more  nega- 
tive attitude  of  the  religious  mind — the  one  which 
says,  "Nature  may  indeed  be  a  machine,  but  then  it 
is  God's  machine;  it  is  not  atheistic,  not  beyond  God's 
control,  not  a  power  able  to  defeat  the  purposes  of  His 
providence" — this  earlier  and  more  negative  attitude 
has  secured  an  enormous,  I  am  tempted  to  say  a  mon- 
strous, expression  of  itself  in  the  literature  of  that 
cross-grained  department  of  theology,  Apologetics. 
But  the  later  and  deeper  point  of  view,  the  lesson  of 
grave  and  solitary  hearts,  comes  but  rarely  to  expres- 


172    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

sion ;  here  and  there  in  some  mighty  poet ;  here  and 
there  in  that  Hterature  of  confession,  of  devotion,  of 
passion,  in  which  the  reHgious  consciousness,  so  far 
as  it  is  capable  of  utterance  at  all,  utters  itself  as  it  is. 
The  religious  mind,  then,  just  because  it  demands 
that  ultimately  all  things  be  seen  in  the  love  of  God, 
cannot,  when  it  does  justice  to  itself,  view  nature 
otherwise  than  as  spiritual  through  and  through  in 
at  least  this  sense,  that  it  is  organic  to  divine  pur- 
poses, is  an  unfolding  of  divine  grace,  is  a  way  of 
man's  communion  with  God  and  of  God's  self-com- 
munication to  man;  nay,  more  than  that — if  anything 
can  be  more  than  that — is  a  place  where  God  dwells 
with  Himself  in  solemnities  of  beauty ;  for  where  God 
dwells  with  Himself  beauty  has  its  native  being,  and 
in  its  native  being  is  as  God  is,  the  most  gracious  of 
all  things  and  the  most  austere,  the  most  terrible  of 
all  things  and  the  most  winning.  But  when  that  is 
once  before  us,  let  me,  for  a  reason  that  will  be  clear 
in  a  moment,  turn  abruptly  to  something  else.  Mod- 
ern men  of  science  in  their  splendidly  effective  work 
have  traced  out  the  vast  ascending  arc  of  natural  con- 
tinuity, and  with  a  weight  of  detailed  evidence  to 
which  theologians  cannot  with  honour  close  their  eyes, 
have  insisted  that  man,  in  every  aspect  of  his  being, 
must  be  viewed  in  his  place  in  that  continuity;  must 
be  viewed  as  organically  connected  with  all  that  is 
below  him  in  the  ascending  scale.  This  may  be  done 
in  Darwin's  way ;  or  it  may  be  done  in  the  earlier  and 
greater  way  of  Aristotle  who  saw  in  nature  an  ascend- 


NATURE  173 

ing  order  of  souls — vital  principles  and  functions — 
and  saw  the  human  soul  as  gathering  all  these  into 
itself  and  adding  to  them  its  own  specific  and  trans- 
forming difference  of  reason.  Reason,  a  principle 
eternal,  absolute,  and  creative,  individualises  itself  in 
man  through  animal  functions  and  in  those  individ- 
uals enters  into  relation  with  an  empirical  world;  so 
that  man  though  he  has  a  divine  element  in  him,  and 
is  rightly  exhorted  to  rise  above  his  mortality,  yet  is 
part  of  nature;  and  psychology  as  an  account  of  the 
soul  is  part  of  natural  science.  It  may  very  well  be, 
indeed,  that  modern  men  of  science,  as  compared  with 
the  great  Greek  idealist,  have  expressed  their  sense 
of  the  continuity  of  nature,  and  of  man's  place  in  that 
continuity,  with  more  accuracy  of  detailed  fact,  but 
with  less  intelligence  of  outlook.  It  may  very  well 
be,  too,  that  their  doctrine  of  man's  place  in  nature 
requires  further  and  very  radical  philosophical  inter- 
pretation. And  in  connexion  with  that,  it  may  very 
well  be  that  one  of  the  most  urgent  and  important 
parts  of  the  vocation  of  the  theologian  to-day  is  to 
act,  not  as  the  mere  critic  of  science,  but  as  a  media- 
tor and  interpreter  between  the  scientific  conscious- 
ness and  the  religious.  All  these  things  may  be.  But 
the  fact  remains  that  nature  and  man  have  been 
shown  to  be  so  bound  together  that  if  nature  be  found 
to  be  Godless  we  have  no  right  to  say  that  the  true 
duty  and  fulfilment  of  man  is  to  give  himself  to  God. 
It  is  not  merely  that  there  are  particular  natural  neces- 
sities within  our  experience,  in  the  sense  that  there 


174    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

are  continually  in  our  experience  particular  elements — 
facts,  events,  feelings — which  are  so  determined  by 
natural  laws  that  we  by  no  power  of  wishing  or  will- 
ing can  alter  them ;  and  which  in  their  turn  are  highly 
influential  in  determining  the  further  course  and  tone 
of  our  experience.  It  is  that  indeed.  But  it  is  more. 
It  is  the  general  organic  connexion  between  our  expe- 
rience as  a  whole,  our  experience  in  fundamental  and 
organising  characters,  on  the  one  hand,  and  the  pro- 
cesses and  histories  of  the  natural  world  on  the  other ; 
the  connexion,  for  instance,  of  interests  that  operate 
effectively  and  indispensably  in  present  morality,  with 
the  long  antecedent  history  of  animal  instinct.  In  us, 
most  certainly,  those  instincts  are  transmuted  by  their 
presence  to  and  in  the  rational  and  moral  soul ;  but 
their  presence  in  us,  in  any  wise  whatever,  indicates 
an  organic  connexion  between  us  and  the  world's  long 
natural  history.  Upon  any  interpretation  of  science 
and  of  its  results,  men  of  science  have  made  out  a 
sufficiently  close  connexion  between  man  and  nature 
to  shut  us  up  to  this  alternative:  either  we  must  be 
able  to  believe  that  nature,  in  all  her  system  and 
through  all  her  history,  is  a  manifestation  of  the  divine 
love,  and  her  ways  ways  of  the  grace  of  God ;  or  else 
the  religious  consciousness  must  be  shut  up  to  a  defi- 
nitely limited  sphere.  And  for  the  religious  con- 
sciousness, thus  to  be  limited  is  to  begin  to  die.  Half- 
gods  are  to  it  no  gods  at  all.  It  is  of  its  essence  to  be 
all-inclusive ;  to  use  Professor  Seeberg's  words  in  an- 
other form,  unless  it  is  our  all,  unless  it  gathers  every- 


NATURE  175 

thing  into  a  love  for  a  God  who  is  supreme  in  the 
world  and  supreme  in  our  hearts,  it  cannot  ultimately 
be  anything  to  us. 

That,  then,  is  why,  a  moment  ago,  I  turned  abruptly 
to  set  the  religious  consciousness  face  to  face  with 
modern  science.  It  is  because  the  general  outcome  of 
modern  science  puts  an  additional  force  on  the  reli- 
gious man  to  make  for  religion  precisely  the  same 
claim  that  religion  in  its  own  consciousness  makes  for 
itself.  If  religion  is  to  have  any  place  at  all,  it  must 
have  a  commanding  and  universal  place,  taking  in  not 
man  alone,  but  man  and  nature  as  a  single  organic 
whole.  But  it  surely  is  better  that  the  theologian 
should  learn  this  catholicity  of  mind  from  religion 
itself  and  in  fidelity  to  the  spirit  of  religion  should 
welcome  science;  rather  than  that  as  a  sheer  measure 
of  self-preservation  in  a  world  which  has  accepted 
the  spirit  of  science,  he  should  take  science  into  reli- 
gion and  so  force  himself  to  a  catholicity  which  in- 
wardly he  dislikes. 

So  far  for  the  view  of  nature  implicit  in  religious 
experience,  and  coming  late  or  soon  to  awareness  of 
itself.  Next  we  have  to  turn  to  our  rational  con- 
sciousness of  the  world;  the  consciousness  which  has 
the  whole  of  life  (including  our  relation  to  nature) 
as  its  object,  and  in  dealing  with  that  object  gives  to 
rational  reflexion,  in  science  and  philosophy  and  the- 
ology, the  right  of  way.    Here  what  we  have  to  do  is 


176    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

to  apply  a  general  position,  already  before  us,  to  the 
matter  now  in  hand. 

Let  me  first  briefly  recall  that  position.  We  began, 
where  in  all  such  inquiries  we  must  begin,  with  the 
fact  that  is  given,  with  experience ;  with  the  conscious- 
ness for  which  there  is  no  definition  except  to  say 
that  it  is  ourselves,  and  that  its  development  is  the 
growth  of  art  and  knowledge,  of  morality  and  religion, 
of  social  and  political  order,  of  all  that  has  an  essen- 
tial place  in  our  increasing  civilisation  upon  the  earth. 
That  consciousness,  as  cognitive,  distinguishes  facts 
from  one  another;  and  at  the  same  time  brings  them 
to  systematic  unity  under  the  forms  of  time  and  space 
and  of  those  categories,  those  implicitly  operative  con- 
ceptions and  intellectual  ideals,  the  continually  clearer 
and  more  critical  use  of  which  is  the  history  of  the 
sciences  and  of  philosophy.  As  practical,  it  lays  upon 
itself  categorical  imperatives,  responsibilities,  ideals, 
and  in  positive  or  negative  relation  to  these — never  in 
mere  non-recognition  of  them — it  carries  on  its  work 
of  subduing  the  earth  and  establishing  upon  it  a  social 
order  of  life.  As  religious,  it  gathers  all  its  concrete 
content  to  unity,  in  devotion  to  an  eternal  and  abso- 
lute principle  which  it  recognises  as  its  source;  devo- 
tion whose  intent  it  is  that  that  absolute  principle 
shall,  in  the  devoted  human  soul,  go  forward  on  its 
way,  accomplish  its  purpose,  and  in  that  sense  fulfil 
itself.  Beginning  with  this,  as  given  matter  of  fact, 
and  asking  after  the  conditions  of  its  possibility,  we 
came  to  believe  that  such  spiritual  history,  whether 


NATURE  177 

upon  the  earth  or  elsewhere,  is  explicable  only  as  a 
process  in  which  an  Absolute  Spirit  at  once  commu- 
nicates himself,  and  seeks  to  fulfil  himself.  With 
that  view,  then,  of  the  real  process  of  the  world,  what 
are  we  to  think  of  nature?  What  can  be  its  place  in 
such  a  process  of  divine  self-communication  and  self- 
fulfilment  ? 

To  begin  with,  we  must  recall  a  most  elementary 
insight.  It  is  an  abstraction  to  take  nature  as  a  system 
of  realistic  things  and  events;  a  system  existing  in  its 
own  right  in  a  realistic  time  and  space.  If  any  man  of 
science  finds  it  convenient  to  make  that  abstraction, 
and  so  gives  to  all  his  hypotheses — atoms,  ethers,  vibra- 
tions, evolutions — a  realistic  setting,  the  abstraction  is 
legitimate  enough,  provided  it  be  remembered  that  it  is 
an  abstraction,  and  that  the  scientific  results  thus 
gained  are  themselves  abstract.  They  are  true  under 
the  abstraction ;  but  they  are  not  to  be  taken  as  a  body 
of  doctrine  complete  in  itself  and  constituting  the  final 
truth  about  actual  reality.  Before  they  are  the  truth 
about  actual  reality,  they  require  further  interpreta- 
tion ;  require  the  restoration  of  the  relations  abstracted 
from.  When  we  thus  remove  the  abstraction,  and  take 
things  as  they  actually  are,  all  these  physical  facts  are 
seen  to  be  organically  connected  with  consciousness. 
Either  they  are  empirical  content  of  consciousness ;  or 
they  are  accepted  and  believed  in  by  us  (in  our  hy- 
potheses) as  the  conditions,  the  objective  order,  of  the 
giving  of  such  content  of  consciousness  to  us.  In 
either  case — in  the  first  case  directly,  in  the  second  so 


178    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

far  as  the  alleged  facts  really  do  exist  (i.e.  so  far  as 
our  hypotheses  are  true) — the  physical  facts  are  or- 
ganic to  the  life  and  history  of  consciousness.  The 
objectivity  of  physical  facts, — the  existence,  that  is,  of 
a  single  definite  and  reliable  order  in  which  stand  both 
the  facts  actually  present  in  our  consciousness  and  the 
conditions  of  their  presence  there  (the  conditions,  for 
instance,  of  the  occurrence  in  my  consciousness  of  a 
given  sensation  which,  in  being  an  event  in  my  expe- 
rience, is  an  event  in  the  history  of  the  world,  linked 
into  all  the  other  events  of  that  history) — this  objec- 
tivity of  physical  facts  means  the  very  opposite  of 
independence  of  consciousness.  It  means  that  those 
facts  are  elements  in  the  one  history  in  which  the  indi- 
vidual and  collective  history  of  human  consciousness 
is  contained  and  has  its  being.  The  only  ground  we 
human  beings  have  for  asserting  such  and  such  a 
physical  thing  or  fact  or  event  to  be  an  objective  reality 
is  (1)  that  that  fact  plays  a  part  in  making  our  expe- 
rience what  it  is;  whether  directly,  by  appearing  in 
experience  under  some  form  of  sensation  or  feeling — 
some  "fact  of  nature"  in  the  way  of  sight  or  sound, 
ache  or  pain,  which  we  by  no  wishing  can  alter;  or 
indirectly,  as  something  which  does  not  appear,  some- 
thing which  is  not  feeling  or  sensation  or  perception, 
but,  no  matter  at  how  many  removes,  is  the  condition 
of  something  which  does  appear;  (2)  that  the  fact  in 
thus  influencing  or  determining,  in  its  own  way  and 
to  its  own  extent,  the  course  and  character  of  our 
experience,    does    so    in    definite    connexions,    which 


NATURE  179 

are  common  to  us  all — does  so,  as  we  commonly 
say,  in  accordance  with  natural  laws.  That  there 
are  laws  and  uniformities  in  nature  means  that 
the  physical  content  of  our  experience  is  given  to  us 
in  a  definite  order  and  under  definite  conditions ;  con- 
ditions which  all  men  of  physical  and  natural  science, 
in  all  their  work  from  the  beginning  until  now,  have 
been  seeking  to  make  more  and  more  clear  to  them- 
selves. So  that  the  laws  of  nature  are,  to  their  own 
extent,  laws  of  experience;  statements  of  the  condi- 
tions under  which  certain  elements  or  aspects  of  our 
experience  are  what  they  are;  and  in  certain  cases, 
laws  of  nature  are  laws  within  individual  human  con- 
sciousness— psychological  laws,  laws  of  the  on-going 
of  the  subjective  process  of  experience.  Space  and 
time  themselves  are  forms  of  the  synthetic  unity  of 
consciousness,  ways  in  which  it  holds  its  facts  to- 
gether in  a  systematic  and  potentially  intelligible  order. 
And  if  we  human  beings  are  in  space  and  time,  as  well 
as  having  space  and  time  in  us,  the  space  and  time  in 
which  we  live  are  themselves  in  the  Absolute  Spirit — 
are  the  space  and  time  whose  concrete  content  is  pres- 
ent to  God  as  the  determinate,  the  definitely  organised, 
whole  of  nature  and  history.  And  space  and  time  are 
only  the  beginnings  of  the  order  of  the  world  of  con- 
sciousness. Even  in  its  imperfect  realisation  of  itself 
in  man,  consciousness  is  a  principle  at  once  intellectual 
and  practical,  being  by  its  categories,  its  interests,  its 
ideals,  the  upbuilder  and  bearer  of  civilisation.  Physi- 
cal facts,  in  being  organic  to  the  life  of  such  conscious- 


180    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

ness,  have  a  nature  deeper  than  the  word  "physical" 
usually  conveys;  a  nature  which  comes  to  light  only 
when  we  consider  the  life  and  the  works  of  spirit- 
art  and  science,  morality  and  religion,  all  those  affec- 
tions and  charities  which  are  at  work  in  the  life  of 
man,  and,  as  working  there,  are  suggestive  of  still 
greater  charities  and  afifections  working  through  all 
the  system  of  the  world. 

The  objectivity  of  natural  facts  means,  then,  that 
there  is  a  regular  and  reliable  order  in  the  world  of 
our  experience;  the  world  of  which  we  have  to  say 
both  that  it  is  the  object  of  our  experience,  and  that 
it  is  the  system  in  which  our  experience  has  its  being. 
And  when  we  remember  that  we  do  not  create  our- 
selves— are  not  the  ultimate  sources  either  of  our  own 
nature  as  able  to  systematise  facts,  or  of  the  nature  of 
facts  as  capable  of  such  systematisation — and  there- 
fore ask  how  we  can  have  such  experience  of  such  a 
world,  the  answer  lies  in  one  direction  and  not  in  an- 
other. It  cannot  lie  in  the  direction  of  abstraction; 
abstract  "minds"  to  which  facts  are  given  from  out- 
side; and  abstract  facts  which  somehow  in  a  realistic 
space  and  time  exist  in  their  own  right,  and  under 
certain  conditions  arouse  sensible  and  intellectual  coun- 
terparts of  themselves  in  those  "minds."  Rather,  the 
place  of  natural  facts  in  our  experience  being  what  it 
is,  the  convincing  hypothesis  about  their  objectivity — 
the  objectivity  which  we  do  not  create,  but  in  which  a 
great  deal  of  our  life  is  based — lies  in  just  the  opposite 
direction.    Those  facts,  we  must  believe,  can  be  given 


NATURE  181 

to  us  as  an  objective  world,  and  we  in  and  through 
such  a  world  can  receive  and  develop  our  being,  be- 
cause, in  the  first  place,  those  facts  and  all  facts  exist 
in  their  concrete  and  systematic  unity  as  the  activity 
and  content  of  an  eternal  mind — -the  Absolute  Spirit 
who  is  the  source  of  our  minds ;  because,  in  the  second 
place,  the  Absolute  Spirit  in  communicating  our  minds 
to  us,  communicates  to  us  impressions  and  feelings 
under  the  conditions  which  we  call  physical,  and  makes 
us  capable  of  apprehending  those  impressions  and  feel- 
ings as  forming,  together  with  their  conditions,  a 
single  systematic  whole  of  reality — makes  us  capable, 
that  is  to  say,  of  apprehending  an  objective  world  of 
experience.  The  unorganised  continuum  of  feeling 
which  is  probably  the  first  stage  of  human  experience — 
in  individuals  and  possibly  in  the  race — is  gradually 
developed  into  man's  ordinary  experience  of  a  common 
or  objective  world.  And  the  fragmentariness,  the  in- 
completeness, the  lack  of  intelligibility,  in  that  ordi- 
nary experience — all  those  characters  of  it  which  leave 
the  spirit  of  man  dissatisfied  and  unfulfilled — are 
more  and  more  overcome  in  that  penetrating  and  sys- 
tematising,  that  mastery  and  conquest,  of  the  world, 
which  already  goes  on  in  our  ordinary  life,  and  which 
we  call  on  its  practical  side  morality  and  religion,  but 
on  its  intellectual  side  science  and  philosophy  and  the- 
ology. The  special  character  of  our  mind  which  makes 
it  thus  capable  of  developing  unrationalised  beginnings 
of  experience  into  systematic  science  and  orderly  life, 
has  been  brought  to  statement  a  thousand  times  and 


182    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

in  as  many  different  ways ;  in  dealing  with  it  in  the 
preceding  lecture  Mr.  Bradley's  form  of  statement, 
and  Mr.  McTaggart's,  were  followed.  It  lies  in  that 
sense  of  the  whole,  that  operative  conception  of  the 
systematic  unity  of  all  existence,  which,  however  im- 
plicitly it  may  work,  makes  the  mind  incapable  of 
resting  satisfied  with  fact  so  long  as  fact  retains  its 
first  appearance  of  being  fragmentary,  of  being  dis- 
connected, of  being  inadequate  to  the  highest  purpose. 
Of  this  sense  of  the  whole  two  things  are  to  be  said. 
First,  it  is  of  the  very  essence  of  human  personality. 
It  realises  itself  on  the  intellectual  side  in  the  cate- 
gories, from  whose  points  of  view  we  unify  expe- 
rience by  systematising  its  facts ;  on  the  practical  side, 
in  that  demand  of  the  whole  upon  the  part,  obedience 
to  which  is  morality  and  religion,  disobedience  to  which 
is  selfishness  toward  men  and  rebellion  against  God. 
Secondly,  the  presence  in  us  of  this  operative  sense 
of  the  whole,  is  explicable  only  as  a  communication 
(a  communication  which  is  the  origin  of  our  life)  on 
the  part  of  the  supreme  spiritual  subject  who  is  eter- 
nally and  creatively  the  principle  of  the  whole. 

If  we  were  thinking  only  of  our  knowledge  of 
nature,  this  might  be  put  briefly  by  saying  that  in 
order  to  understand  how  such  a  thing  as  science  of 
nature  is  possible — nay,  in  order  to  understand  the 
possibility  of  the  ordinary  man's  everyday  acquaint- 
ance with  nature,  of  which  all  natural  science  is  only 
a  further  systematisation — we  must  believe  not  only 
that  nature  is  in  God,  in  the  sense  of  being  an  activity 


NATURE  183 

or  thought  of  God,  but  also  that  God  is  in  us,  in  the 
sense  that  He  communicates  to  us  our  intellectual 
being,  so  constituted  (in  its  special  categories  and  in 
its  general  sense  of  the  unity  of  all  existence)  that  by 
its  free  energising  it  is  able  to  follow  that  thought  of 
God  which  is  nature. 

But  the  cognitive  relation  to  nature ;  the  endeavour, 
in  everyday  life  and  in  science,  to  know  natural  fact 
as  objective,  and  the  development,  unsought  but  real, 
of  the  intellectual  being  of  man  in  that  knowledge  and 
in  the  effort  after  it; — this  is  only  part  of  our  total 
relation  to  nature.  Our  intercourse  with  nature  is 
both  intellectual  and  practical;  and  if  the  view  here 
taken  be  sound,  all  this  intercourse  with  nature  must 
be  regarded  as  a  process  in  which  the  Absolute  Spirit, 
the  subject  of  the  world,  makes  our  life  possible  by  an 
activity  which  we  cannot  present  to  ourselves  under 
any  form  of  imagination  but  which  we  must  think  of 
as  an  activity  of  reproduction,  of  self-communication, 
of  making  Himself  the  creative  principle  of  "finite" 
individualities.  God,  we  must  believe,  has  the  whole 
of  fact,  the  whole  of  nature  and  history,  present  to 
Him  in  a  presence  which  is  its  creation.  In  that  pres- 
ence it  is  a  system  which  is  absolute  as  including  all 
particular  reality,  infinite  as  having  all  its  determi- 
nations within  itself,  eternal  as  being  the  whole  con- 
tent of  time  held  in  one  grasp,  held  totum  simul. 
Human  knowledge  means  that  that  system  is,  to  the 
extent  to  which  human  knowledge  goes,  reproducing 
itself  in  and  as  our  articulated  consciousness  of  the 


184    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

world;  a  consciousness  which  also  (since  our  whole 
experience  is  itself  an  organic  part  of  the  world)  is 
a  consciousness  of  the  self,  a  knowledge  of  our  own 
nature  and  relations.  And  the  development  of  knowl- 
edge which  thus  takes  place  is  itself  a  part  or  factor 
in  the  total  creative  process  in  which  God  gradually 
brings  into  existence  His  true  creation,  a  society  of 
spiritual  beings;  a  society  in  whose  life  (so  far  as  we 
know  that  life  in  man)  nature  is  at  once  the  object  of 
knowledge  and  the  arena  and  material,  the  laws  and 
conditions,  of  practice.  But  what  makes  the  human 
soul  capable  of  being  the  place  of  the  reproduction 
which  thus  is  knowledge,  and  of  the  gradual  creation 
in  which  knowledge  is  a  factor — or  rather,  what 
constitutes  the  very  form  and  method  of  that  crea- 
tion— is  the  fact  that  God,  the  creative  subject  of  the 
eternal  or  objective  system  of  reality,  so  communi- 
cates Himself  in  our  human  personality  that  in  all 
our  apprehension  of  parts  the  principle  of  the  whole 
is  within  us,  impelling  us  to  bring  for  ourselves  the 
parts  into  those  relations  to  one  another  and  to  the 
whole  which  they  have  in  their  objective  or  eternal 
being;  whether  those  parts  are  natural  facts  that  we 
have  not  yet  seen  in  the  completeness  of  their  rela- 
tions, or  social  facts  that  we  cannot  accept  as  a  per- 
manent and  final  order  of  life.  We  might  sum  it  up 
in  a  great  word  of  Dante's :  in  bringing  himself  into 
accord  with  truth,  whether  it  be  the  theoretical  truth 
which  is  knowledge  of  nature  or  the  practical  truth 
which   is   social   righteousness,   man   eternalises   him- 


NATURE  185 

self ;  he  develops  in  himself  a  consciousness  which, 
in  so  far  as  it  is  true,  is  eternal — is  with  an  eternal 
object  made  one.  The  infinite  whole  is  eternally  con- 
scious of  itself,  in  the  sense  that  God,  in  being  con- 
scious of  Himself,  is  conscious  of  the  complete  system 
of  reality  which  He  constitutes  and  maintains  and  in 
which,  as  we  must  believe.  He  realises  Himself  as 
active  goodness  and  love.  But  that  infinite  whole  has 
also  a  consciousness  of  itself,  inchoate,  discursive,  and 
yet  tenaciously  and  by  inner  nature  progressive,  in 
the  countless  finite  minds  which  are  themselves  or- 
ganic parts  of  the  whole  and  which,  therefore,  as  was 
noted  a  moment  ago,  have  in  their  consciousness  of 
the  world,  as  far  as  it  goes,  a  true  consciousness  of 
themselves,  and  in  their  consciousness  of  themselves 
a  key  to  the  nature  of  the  world.  What  Dante  and 
the  great  philosophy  of  which  he  is  the  spokesman 
would  tell  us,  and  what  we  cannot  repeat  to  ourselves 
too  often  in  an  age  when  analytic  psychology  is  fre- 
quently taken  as  in  principle  a  complete  account  of 
experience,  is  in  the  first  place  a  matter  of  fact,  and 
in  the  second  place  an  insight.  The  matter  of  fact 
is  that  man's  growing  consciousness  is  not  a  merely 
self-contained  individual  consciousness,  a  conscious- 
ness whose  whole  reality  can  be  exhibited  by  psycho- 
logical analysis ;  it  is,  on  the  contrary,  a  growing  con- 
sciousness of  a  world  in  which  man  is  himself  a  part 
or  member,  a  world  in  which  individual  experience 
has  its  being  in  collective  or  social  experience,  and  the 
collective  and  historical  experience  of  mankind  is  itself 


186    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

part  of  a  greater  whole  of  reality.  The  insight  is  that 
that  greater  or  all-inclusive  whole  of  reality  is  a  sys- 
tem which  has  its  being  as  at  once  present  to  and 
constituted  by  an  eternal  spirit,  the  spirit  who  is  God. 
To  put  it  in  terms  of  a  modern  formula,  our  more 
and  more  definitely  articulated  synthetic  unity  of 
apperception  means  not  simply  the  psychological  unity 
of  the  individual  consciousness,  but  the  unity  of  a 
world,  the  object  of  all  science;  a  world  which  we,  as 
ourselves  part  of  it,  progressively  can  possess,  be- 
cause God  possesses  it  eternally  in  an  intuition  which 
is  at  once  knowledge  and  creation.  The  consciousness 
of  the  whole,  we  must  say,  the  consciousness  which 
is  eternal  and  complete,  is,  in  however  fragmentary 
and  discursive  a  fashion,  reproducing  itself  in  the 
innumerable  finite  centres  of  consciousness  which 
themselves  live  and  move  and  have  their  being  in  the 
eternal  consciousness.  An  eternal  spirit  in  whose 
activity  and  self-determination  the  universe  exists ; 
and  the  reproduction  of  itself,  the  communication  of 
itself,  as  the  supreme  form  of  its  activity;  such  is,  we 
must  believe,  the  ground  alike  of  the  existence  and  of 
the  progressive  widening,  the  inwardly  impelled  and 
outwardly  conditioned  development,  of  the  inchoate 
consciousness  which  we  know  in  and  as  ourselves. 
And  such  reproduction  is  not  something  abstract.  It 
is  throughout  a  matter  of  definite  or  personal  con- 
sciousness ;  it  means  that  the  God  who  eternally  is 
conscious  of  Himself  and  of  the  world  which  He 
constitutes,  gives  rise  to  man  by  an  impartation  of 


NATURE  187 

Himself;  an  impartation  such  that  the  spirit  of  man, 
while  discursive  in  procedure  and  therefore  always 
incomplete,  yet  has  that  synthetic  character,  that 
demand  for  unity  and  wholeness,  which  (speaking 
from  the  human  side)  is  in  one  of  its  aspects  the  driv- 
ing power  of  all  effort  after  knowledge,  and  in  another 
of  its  aspects  is  the  driving  power  of  all  moral  growth, 
of  all  effort  after  social  righteousness,  of  all  religious 
passion  and  aspiration. 

The  insight  that  the  activity  of  the  absolute  prin- 
ciple of  the  world  is  involved  in  all  the  stages  and 
constituents  of  the  experience  of  man — man  being 
the  race  and  the  individual  in  the  race ;  that,  therefore, 
man's  growing  apprehension  of  himself,  his  growing 
possession  of  his  life  and  of  the  world,  is  a  growing 
apprehension  by  him  of  that  absolute  principle,  a 
progressive  knowledge  of  God  and  of  the  ways  of  God ; 
that,  in  other  words,  man's  knowledge  of  reality  and 
his  practical  mastery  of  the  world  approach  their  full 
truth  only  as  they  become  the  mind  whose  light  is 
God,  the  devotion  whose  object  is  God — so  that  we 
must  deepen  the  formula  used  a  moment  ago,  and 
where  we  saw  that  our  consciousness  of  the  world, 
so  far  as  it  goes,  is  a  true  consciousness  of  ourselves, 
must  now  see  in  our  apprehension  and  knowledge  of 
God  (which  involves  our  being  apprehended  by  God) 
our  only  adequate  consciousness  either  of  the  world 
or  of  ourselves ;  that,  furthermore,  this  knowledge  of 
God,  only  in  which  does  man  know  anything  whatever 
as  it  in  principle  truly  is,  is  not  something  abstractly 


188    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

intellectual,  but  is  at  once  intelligence  and  religion — 
an  indissoluble  unity  of  science  and  action,  of  contem- 
plation and  affection,  such  as  rightly  is  called  eternal 
life ; — the  view  thus  summed  up  we  are  concerned  with 
at  this  point  only  in  its  application  to  nature.  But  the 
view  itself  I  take  to  be  what  we  have  to  learn  from  all 
the  great  idealistic  philosophers;  or,  as  perhaps  we 
ought  rather  to  call  them,  the  great  men  who  have  led 
the  world's  scientific  struggle  toward  Idealism.  Cer- 
tainly it  is  the  view  of  the  world  and  of  man's  experi- 
ence suggested  by  Plato.  Aristotle,  when  we  remember 
that  he  has  in  him  principles  which  call  for,  and  make 
possible,  the  overcoming  of  his  dualism,  leads  us  in  the 
same  direction.  And  this  view  of  experience  and  of 
history  is  surely  the  soul  of  truth  in  the  enormous  sys- 
tematisings  of  Hegel.  But  in  Hegel  the  logical  method 
is  a  tyrant,  and  at  the  end  the  emphasis  falls  wrongly; 
the  experience  which  to  him  is  the  fulfilment  of  all  our 
experience — the  religion  which,  in  absolute  knowledge, 
has  grasped  its  own  principle  and  therefore  the  prin- 
ciple of  all  reality — is  taken  rather  as  philosophy  than 
as  religion. 

Nature,  then,  has  its  being  in  a  process  in  which 
God  fulfils  Himself  in  the  gradual  creation  of  a  spirit- 
ual society.  But,  as  we  have  had  at  every  point  to 
notice,  we  ourselves  are  active  in  that  process.  To 
have  knowledge  of  nature  the  human  soul  must 
exert  energies  of  its  own;  although  those  ener- 
gies  of   its   own   could   neither   exist,   nor   have   any 


NATURE  189 

effect  in  the  way  of  knowledge,  unless  similar 
energies  were  working  on  a  greater  scale  through  the 
whole  of  nature.  And  if  this  is  true  of  the  knowledge 
of  nature,  still  more  is  it  true  of  that  practical  inter- 
course with  nature — the  labour  and  wrestle,  the 
steadily  growing  mastery  crossed  by  occasional  and 
terrible  defeat — which  has  an  even  greater  place  than 
knowledge  in  the  total  process  in  which  we  at  once 
receive  and  achieve  our  spiritual  being.  But  most  of 
all  is  it  true  just  there  where  active  energies  seem  laid 
aside,  knowledge  and  practice  having  passed  over  into 
what  transcends  and  yet  fulfils  them;  the  contempla- 
tion and  the  love  in  which  man  is  made  one  with 
nature;  not  through  the  death  whereby  nature  makes 
those  who  are  dear  to  her  a  perpetual  presence;  but 
in  a  life  which  is  life  indeed,  the  life  known  to  him 
whose  steady  eyes  saw  still  farther  than  Shelley's — 
that  in  which  the  burthen  of  the  mystery,  the  weight 
of  all  this  unintelligible  world,  is  lightened,  and  we 
see  into  the  life  of  things,  apprehending  a  presence 
far  more  deeply  interfused,  wherein  in  community 
of  life  all  thinking  things  are  with  all  objects  of  all 
thought  made  one.  Through  the  breathing  of  divine 
breath  into  the  dust  of  the  ground  nature  has 
been  brought  at  last  in  the  soul  of  man  to  know  her 
own  spiritual  being — perhaps  in  greater  souls,  but  at 
any  rate  in  the  soul  of  man ;  and  the  man  that  thus  has 
entered  upon  being  learns  late  or  soon  to  know  as  it 
truly  is  the  dust  of  the  ground  from  which  he  came; 
learns  to  know  it  in  the  flame  of  morning  and  of  even- 


190    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

ing,  in  the  solemn  beauty  of  the  mountains  and  the  sea, 
in  the  silence  of  the  fields  and  of  the  starry  sky. 
Knowing  these  things,  he  knows  the  companion  and 
home  of  his  own  soul.  Her  majestic  gates  his  city 
opens  to  him ;  cor  magis — still  more  her  heart. 

So  that  the  total  creative  process  in  which  nature 
has  its  being — the  process  which  from  God's  side  must 
be  described  as  His  fulfilment  of  Himself — must  also 
be  described  from  our  side  as  the  process  wherein  our 
individuality,  which  to  our  own  consciousness  of  it 
seems  to  begin  with  nothing,  gradually  is  given  to  us, 
and  gradually  by  our  exercise  of  our  own  energies  is 
developed.  And  the  theologian  does  well,  and  not  ill, 
to  open  his  mind  to  the  great  place  which  nature  takes 
in  this  process  of  the  creation  and  development  of 
human  individuality.  In  the  scientific  endeavour  to 
penetrate  to  the  real  or  eternal  relations  of  natural  fact 
with  natural  fact,  and  still  more  in  the  long  struggle 
to  turn  natural  materials,  natural  powers,  natural  laws, 
to  human  ends — not  to  speak  here  of  the  companion- 
ship in  which  the  soul  of  man  finds  its  counterpart  in 
nature — we  come  to  be  ourselves.  Nature  is  thus  a 
place  and  a  means  both  of  the  self-realisation  of  intelli- 
gence and  of  the  development  of  rational  will.  And 
behind  all  this  there  stretches  out  a  longer  history  in 
which,  just  as  truly,  natural  processes  have  been  or- 
ganic to  spiritual  development.  Through  natural  pro- 
cesses going  back  in  time  beyond  the  power  of  science 
to  follow  with  exactitude — through  the  slow  forma- 
tion of  an  animal  body  from  the  dust  of  the  ground. 


NATURE  191 

and  the  slow  shaping  of  instincts  and  passions  that 
now  in  us  are  the  impulses  and  the  objects  of  a  rational 
will — our  spiritual  being  has  been  communicated  to 
us  as  a  human  life  upon  the  earth.  With  regard  to 
both  these  things — the  original  giving  of  our  spiritual 
being  and  its  capabilities,  the  gradual  realisation  of 
some  of  those  capabilities  through  intellectual  and 
practical  intercourse  with  nature — we  must  think  of 
nature  as  the  medium  or  method  of  that  gradual  self- 
communication  of  God  by  which  alone  have  we  any- 
being  at  all,  or  any  continuance  and  history,  any  in- 
crease and  development,  of  that  being  in  the  process 
which  is  our  life.  We  admit  a  confusion  into  our 
thought  if  we  say  in  an  absolute  sense  that  nature  as 
the  physical  order  is  God's  creation.  God's  creation 
is  a  spiritual  society,  gradually  being  realised  by  con- 
tinual communication  from  God  Himself — the  creative 
grace  of  God.  Nature,  in  all  its  history,  in  all  its 
processes,  in  all  its  uniformities,  is  a  medium  of  that 
self-communication,  in  the  sense  that  in  the  way  just 
indicated  man  comes  in  a  physical  order  to  be  what 
he  is ;  through  the  physical  receiving  his  spiritual 
being,  in  the  physical  having  an  arena  and  materials, 
laws  and  a  home,  for  the  development  of  his  spiritual 
capabilities.  And  this  from  the  earliest  state  of  man 
which  history  can  conjecture ;  whether  that  in  which 
primitive  men  made  their  first  frail  shelters  against 
storm  and  cold,  and  organised  their  rigid,  and  to  our 
eyes  hideous,  social  order ;  or  whether  there  has  been 
upon  the  earth  some  still  earlier  history  which  has  a 


19-3    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

real  connexion  with  what  now  we  know  as  the  history 
of  mankind. 

But  I  must  come  once  more  to  the  point  which  in 
these  lectures  is  always  before  us.  The  total  process 
which,  viewed  from  below,  is  the  experience  of  man 
as  a  history  in  time,  while  viewed  from  above  it  is  an 
eternal  or  completely  systematic  reality  in  which  man, 
himself  a  part  of  it,  gradually  makes  himself  at  home — 
this  total  process  is  made  possible  by  the  self-commu- 
nicating activity  of  God;  and  as  so  often  already  has 
been  said,  we  cannot  think  of  God's  activity  as  exter- 
nal to  His  nature.  His  activity  is  His  realisation  of 
Himself.  We  must  say,  then,  that  God  fulfils  Him- 
self in  nature,  in  the  sense  that  He  fulfils  Himself  in 
that  whole  of  creative  activity  in  which  nature  is  an 
organic  factor;  a  means  toward  an  end,  if  we  will,  but 
in  the  one  creative  activity  of  God  the  end  reflects  its 
glory  on  the  means,  and  the  means  by  its  splendour 
makes  possible  the  end.  Or  rather,  in  the  activity 
of  God,  in  which  there  are  no  merely  external  rela- 
tions, the  means  is  itself  part  of  the  end ;  is  part  of  the 
concrete  filling  and  structure  of  the  end ;  so  that  God 
in  fulfilling  Himself  in  the  end,  fulfils  Himself  in  a 
very  true  sense  in  the  means. 

With  regard  to  nature  there  is,  then,  in  the  final 
outcome  and  meaning  of  things,  a  very  real  harmony 
between  religion  and  reason.  Religion,  as  we  have 
tried  at  every  point  to  keep  clear  to  ourselves,  means 
taking  God's  point  of  view ;  means  determining  the 


NATURE  193 

whole  of  experience,  including  nature,  with  reference 
to  God.  It  means  asking,  with  regard  to  the  realities 
of  the  world.  How,  in  these  things,  is  God  fulfilling 
Himself;  or  how,  by  human  devotion,  is  He  to  be 
enabled  to  fulfil  Himself f  So  long  as  we  are  con- 
cerned in  human  self-realisation — the  fulfilment  of  the 
capabilities  of  the  race — solely  for  its  own  sake,  we 
are,  as  we  have  seen,  at  the  level  of  morality;  a  high 
level,  but  not  the  highest.  We  do  not  reach  the  level 
of  religion  until  for  us  the  centre  of  gravity  is  not  in 
human  nature  but  in  God ;  until  we  think,  not  of  human 
self-fulfilment  for  its  own  sake,  but  of  God's  fulfilling 
Himself  in  us — in  us  as  individuals  and  in  the  col- 
lective life  of  our  race;  and  hence  are  led  to  devote 
ourselves  in  self-surrender  to  God.  It  is  not  that  we 
seek  any  the  less  the  realisation  of  humanity;  but  it 
is  sought  for  God's  sake ;  a  man's  interest  in  his  fellow 
men  being  not  lessened,  but  deepened,  when  he  sees 
that  he  can  so  devote  himself  to  it  as  in  it  to  be  devoting 
himself  to  God.  And  religion,  regarding  all  things 
from  that  point  of  view,  must,  if  it  would  do  itself 
justice,  regard  from  the  same  point  of  view  nature 
and  all  our  intellectual  and  practical  intercourse  with 
nature;  even  though  to  no  small  number  of  religious 
men  we  seem  in  our  intercourse  with  nature  to  be 
farthest  away  from  religion.  But  that  brings  us,  with 
regard  to  nature,  to  a  convergence  of  religion  and  rea- 
son upon  a  common  goal.  For  what  we  have  just 
seen  is,  that  when  in  our  rational  consciousness  we  try 
to  know  things  as  they  are,  we  have  to  view  nature 


194    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

as  being  essentially  what  the  religious  consciousness 
implies  it  to  be;  have  to  view  it  as  a  process,  or  an 
organic  part  of  a  process,  in  which  God  is  seeking  to 
fulfil  Himself.  In  the  intercourse  with  nature,  for 
instance,  which  is  the  development  of  science,  it  is  not 
merely  that  we  are  realising  our  nature  as  intelligence ; 
the  divine  and  eternal  principle  of  the  whole  is  real- 
ising itself  in  us.  Our  freedom  and  individuality  as 
intellectual — the  nature  of  our  mind  as  animated  by 
a  sense  of  the  whole  and  hence  as  actively  gathering 
facts  into  a  synthetic  unity  of  apperception — means 
the  whole,  which  in  the  creative  consciousness  of  God 
knows  itself  absolutely  and  eternally,  coming  also  to 
know  itself  in  individual  human  centres;  conscious 
centres  which  are  themselves  God's  real  creation,  so 
that  consciousness,  altogether  in  God  and  potentially 
in  man,  is  a  true  infinite,  having  itself  as  its  own  object 
and  "other."  Our  freedom  and  our  individuality,  then, 
even  in  their  intellectual  expression  and  realisation  of 
themselves  in  the  knowledge  of  nature,  are  really  what 
in  our  experience  as  religious  they  already  know  them- 
selves to  be  and  rejoice  to  be — God  living  in  us,  and 
in  the  achievement  of  truth  which  he  makes  possible 
to  us  realising  Himself.  And  if  this  is  true  of  our 
intellectual  or  scientific  intercourse  with  nature,  still 
more  is  it  true  of  our  relation  to  nature  in  practice  and 
in  contemplation,  so  far  as  in  the  contemplation  and 
the  practice  we  do  justice  either  to  nature  or  to  our- 
selves. To  put  it  (I  think  fairly)  in  one  summary 
word,  our  intercourse  with  nature  has  in  it  a  prin- 


NATURE  195 

ciple — is  made  possible  by  a  principle — which  receives 
full  justice  and  expression  only  in  that  faith  and  vision 
which  is  Christianity;  the  vision  and  faith  to  which 
the  whole  of  experience,  alike  intellectual  and  prac- 
tical, alike  in  knowing  and  feeling  and  doing,  alike  in 
science  and  art,  in  morality  and  religion,  means  God 
living  in  man  and  animating  man  with  the  divine  or 
universal  point  of  view,  the  point  of  view  of  the 
whole — nay,  the  point  of  view  of  the  Father  of  our 
spirits  who  would  be  unspeakably  less  than  a  father 
if  in  the  lives  and  achievements  of  his  human  children 
He  did  not  live  some  great  part  of  His  own  life. 

In  connexion  with  the  foregoing,  two  special  points 
call  for  mention,  and  it  is  best  to  set  them  down  at 
once.  The  first  is  this.  When  it  is  said  that  nature 
is  a  medium  through  which  God  communicates  that 
spiritual  being,  and  those  spiritual  capabilities,  which 
are  the  soul  of  man;  the  communication  being  gradual 
and  involving  a  process  of  growth  in  which  man  be- 
comes more  and  more  active,  co-operating  more  and 
more  with  God; — when  this  is  said,  the  statement  is 
intended  to  be  exhaustive  with  regard  to  the  place  and 
function  of  nature  in  human  experience  and  in  the 
development  of  human  experience.  But  it  is  not  in- 
tended to  be  an  exhaustive  statement  either  about  the 
place  of  nature  in  God's  thought  and  activity,  or  about 
God's  way  with  man.  Nature,  it  is  said,  is  a  medium 
of  God's  self-impartation ;  but  that  does  not  imply  that 
it  is  the  sole  medium ;  it  may  very  well  be  that  nature 


196    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

is  but  a  part  or  aspect  of  God's  way  of  communicating 
Himself.  Not  to  raise  here  the  question  of  the  rela- 
tion of  historical  revelation,  and  the  historical  process 
of  redemption,  to  the  uniformities  of  the  physical 
order — a  question  to  which  we  must  turn  later — one 
would  still  have  to  take  into  account  the  suggestion 
of  the  Mystics  that  there  is  a  communication  of  God 
to  man  which  lies  in  its  immediacy  beyond  all  commu- 
nication through  orders  of  natural  and  historical  fact. 
The  theologian  who  is  able  completely  to  rule  out  that 
suggestion,  must  be  gifted  either  with  very  human 
rashness  or  with  more  than  human  insight.  And  as 
likely  as  not,  the  former;  at  any  rate,  there  is  imme- 
diacy in  all  experience,  and  it  is  only  through  such 
immediacies  of  experience  that  nature  and  history 
are  to  us  what  they  are  and  mean  to  us  what  they 
mean. 

In  the  second  place,  it  will  be  noticed  that  upon  the 
view  so  far  taken  of  nature,  and  of  its  place  and  func- 
tion in  the  spiritual  process  which  is  the  history  of  the 
world,  nature  is  at  once  greater  and  less  than  man. 
As  a  medium  in  that  process  of  divine  self-communi- 
cation in  which  man  comes  to  be  man,  nature  is  a 
prius  of  individual  human  existence.  In  and  through 
it,  man,  with  all  his  spiritual  capabilities,  enters  upon 
his  being  and  continually  receives  (if  he  will)  the  en- 
largement, the  development  and  discipline,  of  that 
being.  Into  its  system  of  facts  and  laws  the  indi- 
vidual man  is  born ;  in  accordance  with  those  facts  and 
laws,  he  receives  the  endowment  of  qualities  which,  in 


NATURE  197 

his  measure  of  freedom,  he  must  partly  develop  and 
partly  overcome;  and  thus  it  sets  for  him  the  arena 
and  certain  of  the  objective  conditions  of  his  life.  In 
that  sense  it  is  greater  than  he;  but  in  another  sense 
less.  For  it  is  the  means,  whereas  the  spiritual  devel- 
opment of  the  race  of  man  is  the  end.  Yet  even  in 
saying  that,  we  must  remember  what  already  has  been 
said:  in  the  activity  of  God  means  and  end  are  not 
external  to  each  other ;  they  are  correlative ;  and  what- 
ever glory  is  to  be  in  the  one  must  also  be  in  the  other. 
And  upon  that  qualification  thoughtful  men  do  well  to 
insist.  One  of  the  unconscious  vices  that  do  us  wrong 
to-day,  is  our  impiety  toward  the  earth.  I  mean  not 
now  the  impiety  of  hasty  and  preoccupied  minds,  to 
which  the  perpetual  forms  about  us  can  never  utter 
their  voice  of  memory,  of  consolation,  of  rebuke.  I 
mean  the  more  terrible  impiety  practised  toward  the 
earth  by  a  race  that,  after  age-long  struggle  with 
hunger  and  with  cold,  has  entered  at  last  upon  a  day 
of  natural  opulence,  and  in  that  day  has  built  up  a 
civilisation  wherein  one  knows  not  at  which  to  be  the 
more  amazed ;  the  wonder  of  the  achievements ;  or  the 
incredible  profligacies  of  waste,  and  the  social  injus- 
tice, the  oppression  of  class  by  class,  which  is  the  inevi- 
table outcome  of  the  spirit  of  unashamed  and  waste- 
ful expense.  In  such  a  time,  no  one  who  wishes  to 
see  our  practical  life  and  its  arts  put  upon  just  foun- 
dations can  feel  any  vocation  to  encourage  by  so  much 
as  a  syllable  the  laying  aside  of  what  fragment  still 
remains  to  us  of  the  bygone  reverence  of  men  toward 


198    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

their  ancient  mother,  the  dust  of  the  ground.  To-day, 
after  having  been  to  man  his  foster-mother,  genial  or 
cruel,  his  sublime  and  dread  teacher,  sometimes  his 
kindly  companion,  sometimes  his  terrific  enemy,  she 
has  become  to  him  something  like  his  slave,  the  object 
of  his  cleverness,  the  object  of  his  prodigality.  To- 
morrow, for  our  salvation,  our  devices  outworn  by 
the  march  of  her  ages,  it  may  be  that  she  will  hold  once 
more,  terribly  in  her  inexorable  arms,  her  proud  and 
frail  child. 

But,  returning  to  the  general  position,  I  wish  in  con- 
nexion with  it  to  refer  to  a  famous  and  much  disputed 
formula  concerning  the  relation  of  nature  and  man. 
"Nature,"  so  that  formula  runs,  "comes  to  conscious- 
ness of  itself  in  man."  The  first  thing  to  mark  about 
such  a  saying  is  that  its  significance  depends  altogether 
upon  the  general  setting  of  thought  in  which  it  is 
found.  Those,  for  instance,  who  hold  that  nature 
is  intrinsically  non-spiritual  could  use  it  with  the  mean- 
ing that  human  consciousness  is  a  part  or  a  product 
or  a  function  of  mechanical  and  physiological  pro- 
cesses simply  as  such ;  these  being  viewed  as  existing 
in  their  own  right,  independently  of  any  eternal  crea- 
tive spirit,  and  as  having  in  themselves  the  power  to 
give  rise  to  a  spiritual  principle  in  man.  But  by  those 
who  hold  to  such  a  theistic  view  of  the  world  as  is 
here  in  question,  this  saying  that  nature  attains  to  self- 
consciousness  in  the  soul  of  man  can  also  be  used. 
And  as  so  used  it  is  eminently  valuable.     It  stands  as 


NATURE  199 

a  reminder  of  certain  great  organic  unities ;  and  stands 
exactly  at  the  point  where  such  a  reminder  is  most 
needed — the  point  where  duahsm  and  semi-materiaHsm 
most  readily  creep  in  upon  our  theism.  If  we  believe 
in  God  at  all,  it  is  not  difficult  for  us  to  believe  in  such 
an  organic  connexion  between  God  and  the  human 
soul  as  leads  us  to  declare  with  Saint  Paul  that  in  God 
we  live  and  move  and  have  our  being.  For  God  is 
spirit,  and  the  human  soul  is  spirit,  and  spirit  can 
with  spirit  form  one  society.  But  this  order  of  physi- 
cal facts  and  events,  this  order  of  mechanical  and 
chemical  and  biological  processes  in  space  and  time — 
how  can  there  be  an  organic  connexion  either  between 
it  and  God,  or  between  it  and  the  spirit  of  man? — 
for  on  one  side  is  matter,  on  the  other,  spirit.  And 
most  of  us  yield,  less  or  more,  to  the  pressure  of  that 
feeling:  in  half  our  mind  we  are  theists;  in  the  other 
half  we  are  materialists,  held  back  by  our  religion 
from  living  out  the  practical  consequences  of  our 
materialism.  But  it  is  just  in  warning  us  against 
such  a  dualism  that  the  summary  formula  now  in 
question,  used  as  a  theist  or  as  an  absolute  idealist 
would  use  it,  is  valuable.  Nature  rises  in  man  to  self- 
consciousness.  The  distinction,  that  is  to  say,  between 
Nature  and  Spirit  is  a  real  distinction ;  but  it  is  a  dis- 
tinction zvithin  a  single  system  animated  creatively  by 
a  single  supreme  principle ;  it  is  not  a  dualism  between 
two  mutually  exclusive  orders  of  reality.  Nature  is 
an  activity  of  God;  but  that  activity  of  God  does  not 
terminate  solely  upon  itself ;  it  is  the  means  or  medium 


200    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

in  and  through  whose  long  and  infinitely  diverse  pro- 
cesses God  gives  to  spiritual  beings  their  existence, 
and  the  conditions  of  their  gradual  growth  in  science 
and  art,  in  morality  and  religion.  Men  are  spiritual 
beings  to  whom  God  so  gives  their  life  that  they  come 
up  through  nature.  God,  the  creative  principle  of 
nature,  carries  the  natural  process  to  the  point  where 
there  arises  in  it  the  spirit  which  is  man ;  so  that  in 
the  knowing  and  the  doing  of  man,  in  his  arts  and 
sciences,  his  morality  and  religion,  nature  comes  both 
to  the  conscious  knowledge  of  itself  and  to  the  con- 
scious service  of  spiritual  causes ; — is  fulfilled  in  grace. 
There  is  already  a  prophecy  of  this  in  Aristotle's 
view  of  nature  as  a  graduated  order  ascending  toward, 
and  fulfilling  itself  in,  soul;  the  highest  soul  here 
upon  the  earth,  the  one  in  which  the  natural  process 
here  culminates,  being  the  soul  of  man  which  takes  up 
into  itself  the  functions  of  the  vegetative  and  of  the 
animal  soul  and  adds  to  these  the  distinctively  human 
(and  divine)  element  of  reason.  There  is  a  still  pro- 
founder  and  more  searching  forecast  of  the  whole 
position,  in  the  Platonic  doctrine  of  Reminiscence. 
Modern  men  who,  intentionally  or  unintentionally, 
have  carried  over  into  the  treatment  of  nature  the 
great  speculative  traditions  of  the  oecumenical  the- 
ology, have  stated  the  matter  in  ways  such  as  this: 
God,  externalising  Himself  in  nature,  returns  to  Him- 
self in  spirit  and  in  the  history  of  spirit ;  the  history 
in  which  spirit  does  justice  to  nature  through  the  very 
process  in  which  it  emancipates  itself  from  its  bond- 


NATURE  201 

age  to  nature  and  enters  into  its  heritage  as  spirit — 
enters  into  the  Hfe  in  which,  both  in  knowledge  and  in 
action,  men  take  nature  and  themselves  for  what  they 
truly  are,  themselves  for  children  of  the  self -commu- 
nicating God,  nature  for  a  way  of  His  self-communi- 
cation; so  that  in  the  concrete  or  total  process,  spirit 
is  seen  as  the  truth  of  nature.  When  it  is  said  that  in 
the  science  and  the  religion  of  man,  nature  comes  to 
consciousness  of  herself  and  to  the  truth  of  herself, 
the  statement  is  false,  if  by  nature  we  mean  some 
abstraction — nature  without  God,  nature  as  in  some 
way  independent  and  original  and  creative.  But  the 
statement  is  true,  if  in  it  we  are  taking  nature  as 
nature  really  is — as  a  way  of  the  divine  creation.  To 
say,  in  that  sense,  that  nature  becomes  conscious  of 
itself  in  the  human  soul,  and  in  the  spiritual  achieve- 
ments of  that  soul  fulfils  itself,  is  not  to  affirm  that 
sticks  and  stones  as  such,  nerves  and  nerve-tremors 
as  such,  account  for  the  experience  of  man.  The 
statement  rather  means  that  sticks  and  stones  and 
nerves  are  not  fully  known  until  they  are  viewed  as, 
in  their  natural  system,  a  medium  of  communication 
from  God,  who  is  the  creative  energy  of  nature,  to 
man  who  has  through  nature  the  slow  dawning  of  his 
self -consciousness,  and  finds  in  nature  at  once  the 
sheltering  home  and  the  stern  arena  for  the  gradual 
and  struggling  development  of  the  capabilities  of  that 
self-consciousness ;  until  at  last  the  growing  child 
knows  in  their  truth  the  gracious  forms  of  his  Father's 
house.    Such  a  view,  I  think  we  must  say,  is  not  merely 


202    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

convincing  as  a  matter  of  reason.  It  is  the  view  of 
nature  which  reHgion  more  and  more  tends  both  to 
hold  contemplatively  and  to  put  into  practice,  as  reli- 
gion more  and  more  does  justice  to  itself.  And  this 
being  the  case,  one  is  surely  not  wrong  in  urging  that 
it  is  a  view  intrinsically  congenial  to  the  mind  and 
spirit  of  the  true  theologian.  For  surely  the  aim  of 
the  theological  mind,  so  far  as  it  maintains  its  alle- 
giance to  the  two  great  powers  of  religion  and  reason, 
and  goes  hand  in  hand  with  contemplation  and  with 
faith,  is  to  see  God  in  organic  connexion  with  the 
whole  life  of  the  earth,  and  with  that  whole  history 
of  man  in  which  the  life  of  the  earth  enters  into  con- 
scious apprehension  of  its  own  meaning,  and  strives 
to  realise  that  meaning  for  itself  and  by  its  own 
energies;  the  manifold  energies,  at  once  natural  and 
divinely  given,  of  the  soul  of  man. 

But  we  must  take  a  further  step — the  saddest  that 
human  thought  is  called  upon  to  take — if  we  would 
see  the  whole  significance  of  the  fact  that  in  the  sense 
just  indicated  nature  comes  to  the  conscious  posses- 
sion and  realisation  of  itself  in  man.  That  further 
step  is  the  recognition  of  a  fact  which  lies  at  the  basis 
of  to-morrow's  discussion,  but  which,  in  order  that 
the  matter  may  stand  from  the  outset  in  its  true  per- 
spective, I  must  at  least  mention  here.  It  is  the  fact 
that  in  man  nature  comes  to  be  sin  and  to  know  itself 
as  sin.  However  stern  and  high  be  the  moral  nobility 
of  the  dogma  of  total  depravity,  as  man's  uttermost 
judgment  upon  himself  in  the  presence  of  God  or  in 


NATURE  203 

the  presence  of  men  and  women  upon  whom  he  has 
inflicted  irremediable  wrong;  or  whatever  its  difficulty 
in  reconciling  itself  with  the  mind  of  our  Lord,  who 
saw  in  the  worst  of  men  and  women  beings  capable 
of  responding  to  the  saving  grace  of  God,  and  who 
would  not  have  the  little  children  forbidden,  for  of 
such  is  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven; — however  all  that 
may  be,  it  is  not  with  a  dogma  of  any  sort  that  we  are 
here  concerned,  but  with  only  too  sad  a  fact  of  expe- 
rience ;  one  brought  home  to  us  both  by  our  own  hearts 
and  by  those  ancient  Scriptures  which  perpetually 
search  our  hearts  and  compel  us  to  come  to  ourselves. 
He  is  still  a  child  in  the  observation  of  fact,  who 
imagines  that  our  involution  in  sin  comes  only  through 
wrong  decisions  of  adult  and  enlightened  will.  It 
does  indeed  so  come ;  but  there  is  more  than  that.  Sin 
has  the  character  of  a  universal;  through  nature  it 
passes  upon  all  mankind.  I  had  to  point  out  in  the 
opening  lecture,  how  true  of  our  experience  is  the  sad 
ancient  orthodoxy  which  tells  us  of  original  sin ;  tells 
us  that  before  we  could  consciously  turn  to  God,  nat- 
ural passions  had  already  a  masterful  place  in  our 
will.  Here  it  must  be  pointed  out  in  addition,  that 
to  this  sad  orthodoxy  of  men  who  felt  themselves 
entangled  by  a  power  beyond  their  own  will  in  a  sin- 
fulness that  they  hated,  the  most  penetrating  insights 
of  modern  science  give  a  telling — in  view  of  what  now 
is  in  the  world,  a  fearful — confirmation.  Upon  the 
agonised  confessions  of  the  men  who  felt  the  battle 
within  them  to  be  a  battle  of  spirit  against  nature — a 


204    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

different  law  in  the  members  warring  against  the  law 
of  the  mind,  and  bringing  us  into  captivity  under  a 
law  of  sin — there  could  be  no  better  comment  than 
the  hypotheses  of  modern  science  as  to  the  relation  of 
the  instincts  and  passions  that  now  are  constituent 
elements  of  human  nature,  to  the  long  continuities  of 
that  natural  process  which  goes  back  far  before 
man,  but  at  last,  coming  to  its  goal  in  man,  is  in  that 
goal  heightened  and  transformed,  and  enters  upon  its 
most  powerful  and  most  terrible  workings,  knowing 
innocence  no  more;  knowing  innocence  no  more,  and 
having  no  hope,  unless,  deeper  than  nature  and  deeper 
than  sin,  there  be,  as  the  true  and  inner  reality  of  the 
world's  whole  order  and  the  world's  whole  history, 
some  redemptive  and  saving  process. 

With  this  we  can  sum  up  our  position  so  far.  We 
had  to  ask  what  the  reality  of  nature  is.  And  by 
nature  was  meant,  not  some  second  world  of  mystical 
values  and  operations  hidden  behind  the  physical 
world  like  a  divinity  behind  his  visible  symbols ;  but 
this  actual  world  of  sensible  fact  and  steady  uni- 
formity with  which  the  common  man  and  the  man  of 
science  each  in  his  own  way  deals,  finding  in  it  the 
object  of  his  knowledge,  the  arena  and  conditions  of 
his  labour,  the  stubborn  material  of  his  moral  strug- 
gle— nay,  more  than  that,  the  companion  of  his  moral 
and  religious  spirit,  a  revealing  power,  able  to  bring 
in  times  of  defeat  a  consolation  inexpressibly  grave 
and  high.     Nature  being  such,  and  playing  in  our  life 


NATURE  205 

such  a  part,  we  were  driven  to  conclude  at  least  this, 
that  the  reality  of  nature  is  the  reality  of  a  relation 
between  man  (or  some  wider  society  including  man) 
and  God.  Nature,  that  is  to  say,  is  a  term  or  method 
in  a  spiritual  process;  is  that  through  which  and  in 
which  God  gives  to  us  our  spiritual  being;  a  medium 
through  which  He  makes  the  communication  of  Him- 
self which  is  the  impartation  to  us  of  life  and  free- 
dom and  individuality.  When  we  see  that — and,  I 
think,  only  then — we  at  last  see  nature  in  the  truth, 
not  of  its  empirical  detail  indeed,  but  of  its  intrinsic 
character  and  reality.  It  is  the  divine  way  of  giving 
rise  to  spirit ;  its  laws,  its  principles  of  uniformity,  are 
in  the  last  analysis  spiritual  laws,  divine  purposes ;  its 
necessities  are  divine  media  in  producing  freedom. 

This  might  be  put  in  another  way  by  saying  that 
while,  with  our  imperfect  knowledge  of  details,  we 
are  not  justified  in  carrying  the  teleological  view  of 
the  world  through  nature  in  that  petty  sense  in  which 
teleology  is  applied  within  arbitrarily  selected  sections 
of  reality  (the  sense  which  Kant  ridiculed  in  his  in- 
stance of  the  sand  dunes  and  pine  trees),  yet  in  the 
broad  and  deep  sense,  the  teleological  view  is  valid; 
and  valid  with  regard  to  nature.  For  the  universe  is 
one ;  and  in  that  universe  the  supreme  law  is  the  pur- 
pose with  which  God  constituted  the  world,  and  which 
He  seeks  to  reaUse  through  its  total  process  and  his- 
tory. The  supreme  law  of  nature,  then,  the  law  to 
whose  realisation  the  total  system  of  natural  events 
is  organic,  is  in  the  deepest  possible  sense  of  the  word, 


206    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

an  ethical  law ;  a  law,  that  is,  which  can  ultimately 
be  satisfied  and  fulfilled  only  in  a  certain  state  of 
character  and  society  on  the  part  of  the  self-conscious 
and  self-determining  spirits  who  are  the  primary 
reality  of  the  universe.  All  natural  law  is  thus  in  the 
last  analysis,  spiritual  law,  ethical  law,  religious  law; 
a  statement  which  does  not  mean  that  natural  law 
either  is,  in  its  ultimate  basis,  capricious,  or  can  in 
any  way  (from  God's  point  of  view,  or  man's)  aflford 
to  be  so.  What  it  does  mean  is  this.  On  the  one 
hand,  nature  is  not  an  independent  order  of  exist- 
ence over  against  God.  Nor  can  there  be  any  such 
thing  as  an  ultimate  resistance  on  the  part  of  the 
material  order  to  any  divine  purpose,  or  to  the  divine 
government  of  the  world.  On  the  other  hand,  since 
nature  is  a  factor  in  the  creative  or  self-communicating 
activity  of  God,  the  supreme  law  or  purpose  in  that 
activity  of  God  is  the  supreme  law  of  nature.  The 
purpose  of  God  is  that  highest  natural  law  which 
includes  and  sums  up  in  itself  all  the  system  of  special 
natural  laws  into  which,  in  order  to  realise  itself,  it 
articulates  itself. 

The  ultimate  thing  about  the  laws  of  nature  is  not, 
then,  their  inexorableness ;  but  the  fact  that  in  that 
inexorableness  God  is  fulfilling  Himself  and  fulfilling 
man;  fulfilling  Himself  and  man  even  where  nature 
goes  her  ways  most  relentlessly;  in  the  earthquake, 
and  the  anger  of  the  sea,  and  in  the  laws  that  bring 
us  by  innumerable  paths  to  the  death  which  is  no 
mere  change  of  the  body,  but  for  each  of  us  termi- 


NATURE  207 

nates  upon  the  earth  the  working  of  his  spirit,  no 
matter  with  what  devotion  to  God  and  man  his  heart 
was  set  upon  the  work.  Even  in  that  presence  of 
universal  and  inexorable  death  we  must,  I  think,  hold 
from  the  point  of  view  of  reason  to  the  belief  which 
we  have  already  seen  the  Christian  consciousness 
maintaining  in  its  own  way  of  vision  and  of  faith. 
If  the  purpose  of  God — the  purpose  fulfilled  in  the 
concrete  and  many-sided  communion  of  a  spiritual 
society — is  the  highest  law  of  nature,  the  soul  of  law 
in  all  natural  law,  then  that  purpose  is  the  ultimate 
law  at  work,  as  in  every  part  of  the  process  of  nature, 
so  in  that  part  of  it  which  is  death.  The  purpose 
which  is  thus  the  concrete  law  of  the  world's  whole 
order  we  cannot  conceive  to  be  accomplished  except 
in  the  character  and  society  of  personal  spirits ;  though 
we  know  only  too  sadly  how  great  a  place  among  its 
instruments  and  its  ways  that  purpose  gives  to  death. 
But  that  in  which  alone  the  purpose  of  God  is  capable 
of  achievement  cannot  in  a  divinely  constituted  world 
be  thrown  away,  or  be  used  as  a  mere  means  to  some- 
thing intrinsically  different  from  itself.  And  just  such 
a  thing  is  the  soul  of  man;  it  is  not  merely  a  part  of 
an  eternal  system,  a  mode  in  a  system  of  modes ;  it  has 
within  itself,  under  whatever  present  limitations,  the 
principle  of  that  eternal  system ;  a  principle,  we  must 
believe,  which  God,  having  once  communicated  it,  will 
never  violate.  For  the  violation  would  be  an  ultimate 
defeat  of  Himself.  The  passion  within  us  to  over- 
come the  apparent  victory  of  death,  and  to  complete 


208    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

the  work  left  fragmentary  and  broken  upon  the  earth, 
the  passion  to  have  our  own  part  in  the  achievement 
which  is  eternal,  and  to  be  present  in  the  ultimate  fate 
of  things — this  passion  we  may  well  believe  to  be  one 
of  the  many  prophetic  forms  in  which  the  eternal  order 
of  the  world  has  in  us  a  consciousness  of  itself. 

In  our  manifold  relations  to  the  natural  world  and 
its  unyielding  order  we  are  dealing,  then,  not  with  an 
alien,  a  decisively  limiting,  reality;  but  with  a  reality 
of  which  we  are  justified  in  believing  (though  we 
cannot  penetrate  the  details)  that  it  is  friendly  to  us 
in  the  spiritual  purposes  and  functions  of  our  life;  is 
at  once  the  field  and  the  friend  of  spiritual  develop- 
ments and  achievements.  If  only  the  spirit  of  man  is 
faithful  to  its  vocation,  the  forces  of  nature  which 
"in  themselves  are  nothing,"  become  its  great  allies : 

— Winds  blow,  and  waters  roll, 
Strength  to  the  brave,  and  Power,  and  Deity. 

Man  is  divinely  related,  not  only  where  he  commonly 
and  rightly  thinks  he  is — with  regard  to  the  source 
and  origin  of  his  spirit — but  also  with  regard  to  the 
apparently  neutral  processes  and  surroundings  in 
which  the  struggles  and  the  development  of  his  spirit 
take  place.  His  relationship  to  nature — nature  in  all 
her  processes,  all  her  strange  blending  of  apparent  in- 
difference and  cruelty  with  unspeakable  tenderness 
and  grace — is  in  its  ultimate  truth  a  relation  to  God 
and  to  the  purpose  and  the  ways  of  God.  To  put  it  in 
technical  language,  the  world  of   spirit,   even   in   its 


NATURE  209 

relation  to  nature  where  most  of  all  it  seems  to  meet 
the  iron  barrier  of  a  reality  intrinsically  different  from 
its  own,  is  truly  infinite;  for  the  true  infinite  is  that 
which  finds  itself  in  its  other,  and  hence  has  no  essen- 
tially external  limitations.  Individual  men — each  to 
his  own  extent  and  in  his  own  way  as  an  individual 
member  of  the  world  of  spirit,  different  in  some  re- 
spect from  every  other  individual  there — have  that 
infinity  as  their  heritage  and  home,  their  Verm'dchtnis 
und  Acker.  And  as  that  true  infinity  is  their  heritage, 
so  also  is  true  unity.  The  spirit  of  man  can  have  in 
itself  and  with  itself  no  unity  worthy  of  the  name 
until — by  whatever  new  life  in  itself  and  transforma- 
tion of  its  world — it  has  entered  into  unison  with  the 
realities  that  are  its  opposites.  Its  opposites:  nature 
in  its  necessity  the  opposite  of  our  freedom,  so  long 
as  our  freedom  is  unchartered,  or  we  ourselves  im- 
perfect; God  in  His  perfect  goodness  the  absolute 
opposite  of  our  sin.  But  if  man  be  what  we  have 
concluded  him  to  be — divinely  related,  both  in  his  ulti- 
mate origin  and  in  his  connexion  with  nature — he  has 
in  him  the  hope  and  the  promise  of  such  unity,  the 
hope  and  the  promise  of  being  at  one,  as  with  God,  so 
with  nature;  at  one  with  God  as  a  child  with  its 
father ;  at  one  with  nature  and  the  world  as  that  child 
with  the  persons  and  things  of  its  home. 

It  is  important  to  emphasise  in  this  way  the  true 
character  of  man's  relation  to  nature,  not  only  to  bring 
out  the  essential  unity  of  religion  and  reason  in  their 
view  of  the  world,  but  also   for  a  critical  purpose. 


210    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

There  is  an  immature  Idealism  which  falls  helpless  at 
just  this  point;  an  Idealism  which  only  half  appre- 
hends its  first  elementary  insight,  and  so  never  gets 
beyond  it.  This  Idealism  has  seen,  in  its  too  quick 
way,  that  natural  facts  are  elements  of  experience ; 
has  seen  that  "things"  are  ideas,  or  groups  of  ideas, 
in  our  minds,  and  that  "matter"  is  "a  permanent  pos- 
sibility of  sensation,"  or,  to  put  it  more  fairly,  is  a 
name  for  an  orderly  and  reliable  system  of  presenta- 
tions in  our  consciousness.  But  it  has  not  grasped 
the  nature  of  spirit  as  something  more  than  mere  idea 
and  presentation ;  has  not  grasped  the  active  unity  of 
synthesis  in  our  conscious  life  as  a  growing  experience 
of  an  objective  world ;  has  not  grasped  the  construc- 
tive power  of  reason  in  us  and  in  the  world.  Things 
are  ideas,  it  sees ;  but  the  coming  and  going  of  those 
ideas  in  our  minds  it  can  only  regard  as  something 
like  the  coming  and  going  of  images  in  a  mirror.  The 
mirror  is  there,  and  reflects  whatever  happens  to  pass 
before  it.  Such  Idealism  is  able  to  mark  out  almost 
at  a  single  stroke  its  scheme  of  the  universe.  We 
exist ;  and  God  exists ;  things  are  our  presentations ; 
and  our  presentations  are  given  to  us  by  God.  But 
this  is  one  more  example  of  great  truths  half  under- 
stood, and  made  still  more  powerless  by  being  packed 
into  too  neat  and  easy  a  formula.^    The  man  who  holds 

1  I  have  stated  here  only  the  form  of  this  immature  Idealism  which 
concerns  us  in  dealing  with  the  relation  of  religion  to  nature.  Of  course, 
such  Idealism  is  capable  of  a  very  different  turn;  especially  when  gov- 
erned by  a  purely  analytic  psychology.  In  that  case  it  reasons  more 
logically.  Things  are  my  presentations — the  only  knowable  reality  of 
them  is  that  they  are  ideas  of  mine  or  groups  of  such  ideas.     Then  why 


NATURE  211 

it  has  at  his  finger-tips  the  quickest  of  all  the  formal 
refutations  of  Materialism.  But  the  Materialism  and 
the  Idealism  which  consist  in  abstractly  opposing  mat- 
ter and  spirit,  and  then  choosing  one  or  the  other  as 
the  real,  are  neither  of  them  of  much  concern  to  us. 
What  does  concern  us  is  the  fact  that  while  "things" 
are  truly  "our  ideas,"  yet  we  ourselves  as  individual 
consciousnesses  have  had  a  gradual  growth  from  noth- 
ing to  our  present  being,  and  in  that  growth  precisely 
this  world  of  "things,"  this  world  of  natural  facts,  has 
played  a  great  and  determinative  part ;  a  determina- 
tive part  which  can  be  indicated  in  at  least  three  re- 
spects. First,  in  the  narrow  or  psychological  sense,  in 
which  things  are  presentations  to  individual  minds. 
In  this  sense,  natural  facts  are  certainly  elements  in 
conscious  process;  but  those  elements  come  and  go  in 
the  individual  minds  concerned,  in  a  way  which  is  to 
a  very  considerable  extent,  determinative  of  the  expe- 
rience in  which  they  come  and  go.  Even  as  presenta- 
tions in  individual  experiences,  natural  things  and 
events  enter  among  the  factors  which  influence,  and 
sometimes  decisively  determine,  the  course,  the  tone, 
the  whole  general  character,  of  the  experiences  in 
question.  And  when  even  thus  much  has  been  seen, 
it  has  to  be  admitted  that  to  the  extent  to  which  this 
obtains,  man  is  a  product  of  "nature,"  and  his  expe- 

call  them  "things"  any  longer?  My  presentations  they  are,  and  I  have 
no  right  to  call  them  anything  more.  So  we  come  by  a  way  still  swifter 
than  Hume's  to  the  denial  of  objective  reference;  the  denial  of  an 
objective  order  of  nature,  and  of  other  selves  constituting  an  objective 
social  order. 


212    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

rience  an  experience  determined  by  nature  and 
natural  law.  If  "nature"  is  essentially  mechanical  in 
its  course  and  determination  (as  it  might  be  without 
being  material — might  be  as  a  system  and  succession 
of  psychical  elements),  so,  to  the  extent  here  in  ques- 
tion, is  man.  In  other  words  the  Materialism  that  has 
been  too  easily  refuted  comes  back  in  a  subtler  form ; 
as  a  psychological  fatalism,  a  mechanical  process  of 
psychical  elements  and  of  their  complexes.  And  then 
all  that  our  Idealism  amounts  to  is  that  this  fatal  or 
mechanical  psychic  process,  going  on  in  and  as  our 
individual  minds,  is  immediately  the  work  of  God ;  in 
other  words,  what  we  have  is  not  a  real  Idealism  at 
all,  but  Pantheism  working  itself  out  with  psychical 
categories.  But  this  is  only  the  beginning.  If  I  admit 
the  conception  of  nature  as  a  system  of  facts,  not 
present  in  its  completeness  to  me,  but  constituting  the 
system  of  conditions  under  which  the  sensations  that 
are  present  to  me  are  given — a  conception  employed 
in  particular  forms  in  the  whole  of  common  life  and 
in  all  scientific  work,  and  in  those  particular  forms 
receiving  continual  verification — then  I  must  admit 
in  a  still  deeper  sense  an  influencing  or  determining 
of  particular  elements  of  my  experience  by  nature ; 
and,  to  the  extent  of  these,  an  influencing  of  my  expe- 
rience as  a  whole.  And  then  in  the  third  place,  behind 
all  this  determination  of  particular  facts  in  our  expe- 
rience by  nature  and  natural  law — a  determination 
which,  so  far  as  it  goes,  aflfects  our  experience  as  a 
whole — there  is  what  we  have  already  had  to  con- 


NATURE  213 

sider:  the  general  connexion  of  man's  experience  as 
a  whole  with  natural  histories  and  processes,  in  which 
(according  to  the  judgment  of  men  of  science)  many 
powers  and  tendencies  of  man's  present  being  were 
slowly  shaped  in  a  natural  history  before  as  yet  man 
was.  I  do  not  mean  under  any  of  these  heads  to  make 
the  sweeping  statement  that  natural  determination  of 
our  experience  is  decisive  and  final.  Sometimes  it  is. 
To  name  but  one  out  of  a  thousand  instances,  what  is 
all  my  will,  all  my  resolutely  pursued  scheme  of  life, 
when  I  am  in  delirium  of  fever?  But  in  the  main, 
what  nature  and  natural  laws  and  natural  histories  do, 
is  to  give  us  the  material  upon  which,  as  we  gradually 
struggle  up  from  our  early  semi-bondage  to  it,  we 
more  and  more  react.  To  give  me  the  material  or  part 
of  the  material  upon  which  I  am  to  react,  does  not 
settle  fatally  and  decisively  whether  I  shall  move  up- 
ward or  downward.  But  it  most  certainly  plays  a  part  in 
settling  what  the  particular  road  will  be  along  which  I 
move  up  or  move  down.  Putting  all  these  considerations 
together,  it  is  plain  that  any  Idealism  which  is  to  be 
of  constructive  value  to  the  theologian,  must  have 
some  deeper  insight  into  nature  than  simply  that  it  is 
a  system  of  ideas  in  our  minds.  And  that  is  why  I 
have  dwelt  so  intently  upon  the  greater  and  deeper 
Idealism  which  stands  in  the  succession  of  the  Platonic 
doctrine  of  Reminiscence,  and  has  received  in  our  own 
day  an  immense  reinforcement  from  Hegel ;  the  greater 
Idealism  which,  in  the  effort  to  make  our  experience 
intelligible  to  us,  insists  upon  the  objectively  and  eter- 


214    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

nally  spiritual  character  of  the  natural  world,  as  not 
only  a  system  of  facts  present  to  the  divine  mind  and 
communicated  (in  response  to  man's  effort)  to  man's 
mind  to  be  the  object  of  his  natural  knowledge,  but 
as  also  a  system  of  divine  energies  by  and  in  which 
God  communicates  being  to  created  spirits.  Most  true, 
our  experience  is  in  part  made  what  it  is  by  the  pres- 
ence in  it  of  natural  facts,  and  results  of  earlier  nat- 
ural facts,  whose  laws  can  be  changed  by  no  wishing 
or  willing  of  ours.  But  what  this  means  is  that  God, 
under  forms  of  externality  and  necessity,  continually 
is  manifesting  Himself  to  us  and  in  us,  and  by  that 
manifestation  is  continually  developing  in  us  our  own 
capacities,  continually  communicating  to  us  our  own 
intellectual  and  practical  being  as  free  spirits.  Nature 
in  its  reality  is  what  the  very  highest  demand  of  the 
religious  consciousness  requires  it  to  be;  a  manifesta- 
tion of  God,  a  method  of  His  creation,  a  form  of  com- 
munion between  Him  and  man — communion  the  deep- 
ening of  which  is  a  deepening,  as  of  man's  devotion, 
so  of  his  freedom. 

You  will  notice  what  a  burden — I  do  not  say  of 
struggle,  but  of  final  and  hopeless  antagonism — is  on 
this  view  lifted  from  the  shoulders  of  religious  men. 
If  the  history  of  creation  is  really  the  history  of  a 
self -communication  on  the  part  of  God  through  which 
man  has  come  to  be,  and  is  still  coming  to  be ;  and  if 
nature  is  a  form  of  that  self-communication ;  then 
religious  men  are  set  free  from  the  long  nightmare 
of  a  natural  necessity  which  has  in  it  no  heart  of 


NATURE  215 

grace,  and  of  a  bondage  of  man  to  nature  such  that 
man  can  escape  from  it  only  by  some  desperate,  even 
though  divinely  aided,  undoing  of  his  natural  being. 
Not  that  there  is  escape  from  the  struggle  between  the 
religious  heart  and  nature.  The  very  fact  that  nature 
comes  to  its  right  and  its  truth  in  spirit  means  that 
nature  is  not  to  remain  mere  nature ;  means  that  in  all 
realisation  of  spiritual  capabilities  and  in  religion  as 
the  summing  up  of  such  realisation,  there  must  be 
struggle  with  nature.  If  man  will  be  saved,  he  must 
in  a  very  real  sense  overcome  and  transform  nature; 
must  come  to  the  divinely  intended  consummation 
through  a  great  Negativitlit — that  of  the  men  who  die 
in  order  to  live.  It  is  better  for  us  to  enter  into  life 
halt  or  maimed,  rather  than  having  two  hands  or  two 
feet  to  be  cast  into  the  eternal  fire.  Of  prodigal  and 
luxurious  societies  there  is  no  need  to  speak ;  from 
mere  luxury  he  is  a  weak  man  who  cannot  instantly 
and  easily  save  himself.  But  in  societies  whose  strong 
men,  instead  of  making  themselves  the  bearers  of 
social  functions,  elect  for  the  self-seeking  and  tyran- 
nical life — that  is  to  say,  in  the  civilisation  which  is 
too  much  our  own — the  Negativitdt  involved  in  reli- 
gion and  in  all  goodness  may  very  well  come  to  be  the 
inner  austerity  of  men  who  stand  in  opposition  to  the 
spirit  of  their  age.  And  this  struggle  between  the  voca- 
tion apprehended  as  of  God,  and  the  nature  that  lives 
and  works  in  us  and  in  society — this  struggle  has  been 
in  the  nature  of  the  case  so  intense  that  it  has  mani- 
fested itself  in  one  of  the  greatest  of  the  historical 


216    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

antagonisms  of  human  thought ;  that  between  Chris- 
tianity, as  the  rehgion  of  grace,  and  all  forms  of 
naturalism  in  life  and  in  the  arts.  But  even  in  insist- 
ing to  the  utmost  upon  the  struggle  between  nature 
and  grace,  we  must  not  insist  upon  it  wrongly;  we 
must  not  make  practical  naturalism  to  be  intrinsically 
and  universally  rebellion  against  God.  To  find  God, 
man  has  not  to  pass  out  of  nature,  like  some  exile 
who  did  not  know  that  he  was  an  exile,  but  at  last, 
coming  to  himself,  turns  his  face  steadfastly  toward 
"the  city  which  is  his  own,"  and  leaves  behind  him 
a  renounced  and  hostile  world — aliena  terra.  Rather, 
in  man's  finding  of  God  nature  is  fulfilled;  grace 
being  the  truth  of  nature. 

And  this  has  its  intellectual  side;  the  kindlier  rela- 
tion which  may  exist  between  men  of  religion,  intent 
upon  the  divine  activity  and  purpose  in  nature  as  a 
whole,  and  men  of  science  intent  upon  the  detailed 
steps  of  the  natural  process.  If  nature  is  what  we 
have  come  to  think  it  is,  there  is  no  need  for  us,  either 
as  theologians  or  as  religious  men,  to  start  in  fright 
from  the  prevalent  scientific  belief  in  a  close  connexion 
between  man  and  nature;  especially  in  a  close  con- 
nexion between  the  present  life  of  man  and  the  world's 
long  natural  history.  We  do  well  indeed  to  object  to 
the  assumption  which  is  unnecessarily  woven  into  a 
good  deal  of  otherwise  admirable  scientific  work;  the 
assumption  that  man  is  simply  an  animal  organism 
and  his  place  in  nature  therefore  solely  a  question  of 
comparative   anatomy.      But   that   assumption   is   not 


NATURE  217 

science;  it  is  a  mixture  of  bad  metaphysic  with  bad 
observation  of  fact.  It  takes  nature  as  a  non-spiritual 
realistic  system — which  is  bad  metaphysic;  and  man 
as  merely  an  animal  organism — which  is  to  forget  that 
man  is  the  subject  and  bearer  of  a  spiritual  history 
and  the  upbuilder  of  a  many-sided  civilisation.  But 
taking  man  as  he  is,  and  nature  as  (upon  the  best 
hypothesis  we  can  form)  it  seems  objectively  to  be, 
we  are  not  called  upon  to  struggle  in  the  interest  of 
religion  against  any  science  which  is  scientific.  We 
need  not  be  driven  to  bay,  imagining  that  we  must 
somehow  overturn  science  in  order  to  establish  reli- 
gion. We  need  not  set  up  civil  war  in  human  nature, 
with  the  scientific  impulse  and  innumerable  scientific 
insights  on  one  side,  and  religious  devotion  on  the 
other;  incensed  opposites  between  which  we  must 
choose,  as  though  the  man  who  gives  himself  loyally 
to  one  were  thereby  called  upon  to  renounce  and  to 
seek  to  crush  the  other.  On  the  contrary,  if  nature 
is  a  way  and  arena  of  divine  grace,  nature  and  all  our 
natural  powers  are  truly  fulfilled  only  as  we  rise  to 
religion.  If  the  principle  that  works  creatively  in 
nature  is  a  principle  whose  highest  and  all-inclusive 
manifestation  of  itself  is  grace,  then  nature  receives 
justice  only  as  taken  up  into  that  conscious  and  de- 
voted life  for  which  the  reality  of  realities  is  the  grace 
of  God.  It  is  true  enough  that  there  are  men  who 
seem  constitutionally  held  back  from  the  security — 
the  high  and  generous  and  catholic  security — of  the 
religion  which  has  possessed   itself;   only  when  the 


218    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

mad  energies  of  panic  are  tingling  in  their  veins  can 
they  feel,  vividly  and  intensely,  that  they  are  serving 
God.  Such  men  are  apt  to  take  fright  at  any  sign  of 
mutual  comprehension  between  religion  and  science. 
So  far  from  seeing  nature  as  God's  creative  way,  and 
doctrines  of  development — doctrines  of  the  continuity 
of  process  between  the  lower  life  of  yesterday  and 
the  higher  life  of  to-day — as  just  for  that  reason  hav- 
ing nothing  in  them  for  religious  men  to  fear,  they 
are  apt  to  declare,  without  further  consideration,  that 
such  doctrines  justify  us  in  remaining  at  the  animal 
level  and  gratifying  with  immediacy  of  obedience  all 
our  animal  instincts.  But  this  is  completely  to  reverse 
the  true  view;  with  the  gravest  of  injuries,  as  to  the 
cause  of  truth  so  also  to  the  cause  of  religion.  That 
nature,  with  all  her  marvellous  animal  histories,  is  a 
way  of  God ;  that  the  life  of  man  stands  in  its  place, 
in  intimate  and  organic  connexion  with  the  age-long 
natural  process : — this,  so  far  from  bidding  us  to  re- 
main at  the  level  of  "mere  nature,"  and  to  gratify 
every  passion  as  it  arises,  rather  bids  us  to  fulfil  in 
and  through  nature  the  eternal  and  spiritual  purposes 
of  God.  It  bids  us  continually  to  be  carrying  nature 
to  its  true  goal,  by  making  it  the  material  and  content 
of  religion ;  so  that  nature — to  call  up  once  more  our 
old  formula — rising  to  consciousness  of  itself  in  man, 
may  in  that  consciousness  and  life  of  man  be  lifted 
to  its  explicit,  its  self-understood  and  deliberately  loyal, 
unity  with  God ;  knowing  as  its  final  meaning  and 
outcome,  not  the  sin  of  man,  but  the  grace  of  God  in 


NATURE  219 

which  man  overcomes  his  sin,  and  brings  himself,  in 
the  love  of  God  and  in  the  animation  of  his  life  by 
that  love,  to  his  own  true  manhood;  and  nature  in 
him  to  its  true  fulfilment. 

The  view  of  nature  now  before  us  I  wish  to  apply 
to  two  questions  which  rest  with  grave  weight  upon 
the  religious  mind  of  to-day ;  two  questions  which  reli- 
gious men  can  ask  only  with  unspeakable  pain,  but 
which  they  are  compelled  to  ask  by  some  of  the  most 
telling  of  the  intellectual  forces  of  the  age.  In  view 
of  the  uniformity  of  nature  and  the  invariability  of 
natural  law,  can  such  events  as  the  miracles  of  the 
New  Testament  possibly  have  happened  at  all?  And 
in  view  of  that  same  uniformity  and  invariability,  have 
the  prayers  of  Christian  men  any  real  effectiveness ; 
can  they  really  bring  anything  to  pass,  really  play  any 
part  in  determining  the  course  of  history  whether  in 
individual  lives  or  in  the  race  and  its  civilisation?  The 
former  question,  if  it  concerned  only  a  few  isolated 
wonderful  events,  would  be  insignificant ;  its  impor- 
tance lies  in  the  fact  that  the  events  to  which  it  refers 
were  isolated  neither  from  one  another  nor  from  the 
general  course  of  history,  but  have  had  in  the  religion, 
and  therefore  in  the  total  life,  of  mankind,  a  place 
which  can  only  be  called  creative.  The  question  is 
important  because  what  is  really  at  issue  in  it  is 
whether,  with  fidelity  to  the  scientific  mind,  we  can 
retain  that  oecumenical  reading  of  the  New  Testament 
history  upon  which  Christianity  as  a  world-power  has 


230    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

been  built  up.  Concerning  the  importance  of  the  sec- 
ond question  no  word  need  be  said.  It  is  a  matter  of 
that  communion  with  God  which  to-day  and  in  all 
ages,  is  the  heart  of  religion.  But,  as  you  will  notice, 
it  is  in  a  precise  and  very  limited  form  that  these 
questions  come  at  this  point  before  us.  To-day  we 
have  not  to  discuss  them  generally,  not  to  consider 
their  total  place  in  the  Christian  life  or  in  the  divine 
process  of  redemption.  We  have  to  consider  them 
only  in  relation  to  the  doctrine  of  the  uniformity  of 
nature  and  the  invariableness  of  natural  law;  and 
even  in  that,  have  only  to  trace  the  bearing  of  the 
view  of  nature  now  before  us.^ 

In  each  case,  then,  the  question  at  issue  is  the 
question  of  the  real  character  of  the  uniformity  of 
nature.  When  it  is  said,  for  instance,  that  such  events 
as  the  New  Testament  miracles  cannot  possibly  have 
happened  at  all,  the  meaning  is  not  that  historical 
evidence  proves  these  events  never  to  have  happened, 
but  rather  that,  the  order  of  the  world  being  what  it 
is,  such  events  are  intrinsically  and  at  all  times  im- 
possible. And  in  such  a  position,  "the  order  of  the 
world"  means  virtually  the  principle  of  the  uniformity 
of  nature ;  so  that  what  we  have  to  consider  is  the 
real  significance  of  that  principle. 

The  idea  of  the  uniformity  of  nature  has  in  it  a 
great  truth ;  or  rather,  is  our  attempt  to  bring  a  great 
truth  to  application ;  the  principle  of  continuity.    That 

1  In  the  discussion  which  follows,  I  have  included  one  or  two  para- 
graphs published  earlier. 


NATURE  221 

principle  we  often  do  not  bring  to  explicit  conscious- 
ness ;  the  failure  to  bring  it  to  clear  consciousness  and 
thus  to  do  justice  to  it,  has  often  enough  forced  the- 
ology into  a  false  position  with  regard  to  science. 
But  we  all  really  recognise  it,  in  the  sense  that,  criti- 
cally or  uncritically,  clearly  or  unclearly,  it  governs 
our  thinking;  in  fact,  the  words  which  would  deny  it 
carry  a  meaning  only  by  building  upon  it.  For  the 
principle  of  continuity  is  really  the  application  to  the 
temporal  process  of  the  world  of  that  operative  con- 
ception of  the  systematic  unity  of  all  existence,  which, 
as  already  we  have  seen,  lies  at  the  basis  of  all 
connected  thinking,  of  all  intelligent  experience  what- 
soever. Nothing  in  the  temporal  movement  leaps  sud- 
denly into  being  out  of  nothing;  nothing  arbitrarily 
passes  away  leaving  no  trace  of  itself.  On  the  con- 
trary, the  whole  temporal  process  is  a  unity  in  which 
every  step  is  related  to  all  that  comes  before  or  after. 
The  total  process  is  continuous  in  the  sense  that  the 
conditions  of  the  occurring  of  any  event  are  the  com- 
plete history  of  the  universe  up  to  that  point ;  or,  con- 
versely, that  if  you  analyse  any  event  completely,  what 
you  are  compelled  to  pass  in  review  is  the  total  his- 
tory of  the  universe  up  to  that  event.  In  that  mean- 
ing, the  principle  of  continuity  is  indisputably  binding 
upon  us.  To  think  at  all,  or  to  act  connectedly,  is  to 
recognise  it;  the  only  way  to  escape  from  it  is  to 
cease  thinking  and  acting.  But  it  is  with  this  as  with 
nearly  all  elementary  and  fundamental  principles. 
The  critical  point  is  not  whether  we  shall  accept  the 


222    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

principle  or  no.  About  that  we  have  no  choice.  The 
critical  point  is  whether,  having  accepted  it,  we  shall 
apply  it  so  hastily  and  arbitrarily  as  largely  to  defeat 
the  principle  itself.  The  important  thing  is  the  nature 
of  the  process  which  is  continuous.  The  continuity, 
for  instance,  of  a  purely  mechanical  process,  with 
action  and  reaction  always  equal  and  opposite,  is  a 
very  different  thing  from  the  continuity  of  a  process 
of  spiritual  and  moral  self-communication  in  which 
the  sum  of  energies  continually  increases  as  the  crea- 
tive work  proceeds.  But  if  the  significance  of  the 
continuity  thus  depends  on  the  character  of  the  pro- 
cess which  is  continuous,  our  present  question  merges 
in  the  larger  question,  What  is  the  real  nature  of  the 
world-process  in  which  mankind  has  its  life  and  his- 
tory, and  in  whose  continuity  we  have  no  choice  but 
to  believe?  That,  however,  is  the  question  which  in 
the  preceding  lecture,  and  to-day,  has  been  before  us. 
The  world-process  is  a  creative  work  in  which  God  is 
bringing  into  existence  a  spiritual  society;  bringing  it 
into  existence  through  a  process  of  self -communica- 
tion. So  that  nature  is  a  divine  activity,  a  form  or 
medium  of  the  divine  self-communication  in  which 
man  comes  to  be ;  the  end  or  purpose  which  God  has 
in  view  in  thus  communicating  Himself  and  giving 
rise  to  a  world,  is  the  supreme  law  of  nature.  And 
this  not  in  any  abstract  sense,  but  concretely ;  as  was 
said  a  moment  ago,  the  purpose  of  God  is  that  highest 
natural  law  which  sums  up  in  itself  and  includes  all 
the  system  of  special  natural  laws,  into  which,  in  order 


NATURE  223 

to  realise  itself,  it  articulates  itself.  It  is  only  a  scien- 
tific convenience,  and  not  the  truth  of  things,  to  take 
the  physical  order  out  of  its  true  setting  as  an  element 
in  divine  activity  and  in  human  experience,  and  to 
treat  it  as  if  it  were  an  independent  closed  circle,  with 
an  inner  continuity  of  its  own,  or  even  with  a  series 
of  such  continuities,  physical,  chemical,  physiological. 
But  to  go  further  and  assume  this  uniformity,  or  these 
uniformities,  to  be  concrete  and  final;  to  assume  that 
with  absoluteness  and  finality  they  forbid  us  to  believe 
that  such  and  such  events,  recorded  in  the  traditionary 
history  of  religion,  can  in  the  nature  of  things  ever 
have  happened  at  all; — that  is  to  turn  a  convenient 
scientific  abstraction  into  an  a  priori  theology.  It  is 
to  treat  the  abstract  as  though  it  were  the  concrete, 
the  provisional  as  though  it  were  the  final.  It  is  to 
treat  certain  special  or  abstract  uniformities  as  though 
they  were  the  concrete  continuity  of  that  divine  activity 
in  which  God  creates  a  world  and  seeks  in  it  to  realise 
His  purpose.  Such  a  proceeding,  however,  is  very 
easy.  Easy  as  it  is  to  make  abstraction,  it  is  easier 
still  to  forget  that  one  has  done  so,  and  thus  to  take 
one's  results  as  concrete.  Hence  modern  men  are  con- 
tinually under  the  temptation  to  set  up  at  one  stroke 
an  absolute  foreclosure  against  miracle ;  either  by  as- 
suming as  a  finality  the  point  of  view  from  which 
nature  is  simply  taken  for  granted  as  a  realistic  order, 
without  any  consideration  of  its  relation  to  the  spirit 
which  in  man  knows  it  and  acts  morally  upon  it ;  or, 
still  more  easily,  by  assuming  without  further  inter- 


224    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

pretation  the  point  of  view  of  some  special  science 
of  nature,  with  its  working  hypothesis  of  a  physical, 
or  chemical,  or  physiological,  uniformity.  Not  that 
the  making  of  abstraction  is  necessarily  a  wrong- 
doing. In  any  such  life  as  ours,  the  sciences  which 
deal  with  the  world's  detail  cannot  have  the  totum 
simul  of  intuition ;  they  must  make  abstraction.  Hence 
we  have  special  or  departmental  sciences;  sciences 
which  are  deliberately  abstract,  dealing,  in  a  vast  divi- 
sion of  labour,  with  selected  spheres  or  aspects  of  our 
world  of  experience,  each  taken  in  greater  or  lesser 
isolation  from  the  experience  of  which  it  is  really  a 
part  or  with  which  it  is  organically  connected.  Such 
sciences,  just  by  reason  of  their  abstractness  and  the 
limitation  of  the  field  thus  gained,  are  able  to  move 
with  assured  steps ;  in  some  cases,  where  the  abstrac- 
tion is  particularly  thorough,  with  virtual  infallibility. 
With  this  procedure  of  the  special  sciences  it  is  surely 
no  part  of  the  theologian's  duty  to  find  fault.  But  it 
is  part  of  his  duty  to  point  out  that  when  we  follow 
that  procedure,  we  should  recognise  what  it  is  we  do, 
and  should  not  treat  our  abstract  results  as  though 
they  were  concrete.  When  we  take  things  concretely — 
take  them  as  they  are — the  universe  is  not  a  mechani- 
cal or  merely  physical  process ;  nor  yet  a  merely  physi- 
ological process ;  nor  is  any  part  of  the  universe  a 
merely  mechanical,  or  physical,  or  physiological,  pro- 
cess. If  the  view  now  before  us  is  at  all  sound,  the 
universe  is  a  society  of  spiritual  beings ;  its  process  is 
the  history  of  such  a  society ;  and  the  divinely  con- 


NATURE  225 

stituted  laws  of  that  history,  laws  in  the  deepest  sense 
spiritual  and  moral,  are  the  ultimate  laws  of  every 
part  of  nature.  The  highest  law  of  existence — a 
fortiori,  the  highest  law  of  nature — is  a  divine  purpose. 
In  the  history-in-time  of  the  universe  God  is  working 
something  out,  realising  a  divine  end;  and  that  end  is 
the  inner  soul  of  all  natural  law.  In  nature  there  are 
indeed  processes  which  can  be  studied  as  mechanism, 
and  described  in  mechanical  terms.  But  the  mechani- 
cal description  is  proximate,  not  complete.  The  pro- 
cesses which  can  be  studied  as  mechanical  are  not 
merely  mechanical.  They  are  organic  factors  in  a 
world  which  is  more  than  a  mechanism;  they  have 
their  being  and  function  in  a  world-process  whose  in- 
ward reality  is  a  divine  idea  and  the  orderly  divine 
activity  of  the  reaHsation  of  that  idea;  an  activity 
which  has  in  it  the  truest  and  deepest  of  all  conti- 
nuities, the  continuity  of  a  purposeful  life  of  life  which 
reaches  "from  end  to  end,  sweetly  and  strongly  order- 
ing all  things." 

Except,  then,  as  a  provisional  division  of  scientific 
labour,  we  cannot  break  the  world  up  into  a  number 
of  realms,  each  with  its  own  sort  of  reality,  each  having 
a  continuity  of  its  own.  It  is  only  as  such  a  provi- 
sional working  method  of  science  that  we  get  a  series 
of  uniformities,  each  governing  its  own  particular 
sphere  or  aspect  of  nature  or  of  history.  When  we 
wish  to  take  things  as  they  are — as  we  must  do,  if  we 
are  to  be  in  position  to  assert  the  absolute  negative 
that  certain  specified  events  cannot  in  the  nature  of 


226    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

things  have  happened  at  all — there  is  but  one  con- 
tinuity in  the  process  of  the  world.  The  true  unity 
and  continuity  of  the  world  consists  in  the  unity  and 
continuity  of  its  divine  and  altogether  reasonable  plan, 
a  plan  in  which  God  manifests  and  realises  Himself. 
The  continuity  of  things,  the  continuity  of  that  pro- 
cess which  is  at  once  nature  and  history,  lies  in  the 
fact  that  everywhere  in  that  process  there  is  present 
and  operative  a  purpose  which  is  the  expression  of 
the  nature  of  God  as  reason,  as  righteousness,  as  the 
love  that  gives  all  things — but  so  gives  them  that  to 
the  men  who  achieve  them  they  are  to  the  last  degree 
significant  and  valuable.  The  question  whether  such 
and  such  events  which  seem  to  have  had  an  immense 
place  in  determining  the  course  of  human  history,  ever 
can  have  happened  at  all,  is  not,  then,  a  question  to  be 
finally  settled  by  reference  to  any  abstract  uniformity, 
mechanical  or  physical,  chemical  or  biological.  It  can 
be  settled  only  by  reference  to  that  divine  plan  or  pur- 
pose which  is  the  true  and  concrete  principle  of  con- 
tinuity in  the  world's  whole  process,  including  the 
whole  of  nature.  Events,  or  classes  of  events,  can 
happen  or  cannot  happen  according  to  their  possible 
or  impossible  relation  to  that  plan. 

The  continuity  of  such  a  divine  activity,  such  an 
organising  and  gradual  creation  of  a  spiritual  society, 
is  almost  the  opposite  of  a  mechanical  continuity  with 
absolute  equality  of  action  and  reaction.  It  is  the 
continuity  of  a  process  in  which  a  supreme  and  eternal 
purpose  is  being  realised  by  continual  impartations  of 


NATURE  227 

fresh  life,  and  through  struggles  ever  new ;  a  process 
in  which  no  step  ever  quite  repeats  a  previous  step. 
In  a  spiritual  society  in  course  of  development  in  time, 
the  total  practical  situation  is  never  the  same  at  any 
moment  as  it  was  the  moment  before.  Just  because 
the  history  of  the  world  is  spirit,  and  spirit  is  life, 
there  is  no  exact  repetition  of  events.  Hence  the 
divine  administration  of  the  universe  cannot  be  a  series 
of  repetitions ;  cannot  move  in  a  closed  circle  or  upon 
a  dead  level.  Yet  it  is  truly  continuous ;  every  step  in 
it  is  organically  related  to  the  whole,  and  thus  is,  in 
the  deepest  sense,  under  law.  The  bearing  of  this 
upon  the  disastrous — I  had  almost  said,  the  half- 
atheistic — idea  of  miracles  as  divine  interferences,  will 
come  before  us  presently;  at  this  point  let  us  notice 
that  such  a  continuity  as  has  just  been  indicated  can- 
not very  usefully  be  stated  in  terms  of  mere  uniformity. 
When  we  are  considering,  not  abstract  aspects  of  the 
world-process,  but  that  process  in  its  concreteness  as 
the  history  of  a  divinely  founded  society  the  possi- 
bility of  whose  life  lies  in  a  continual  divine  activity 
of  self -communication,  the  term  "uniformity"  can 
only  stand  for  the  altogether  indisputable  but  rather 
useless  principle  that,  given  absolutely  similar  condi- 
tions in  the  total  process,  similar  results  would  follow. 
For  instance,  if  the  total  condition  of  the  universe 
should  become  at  this  moment  similar — strictly  and 
absolutely  similar,  in  every  minutest  point  of  achieve- 
ment, of  possibility,  of  need,  of  spiritual  darkness  and 
light — to  the  condition  of  the  universe  at  the  time  of 


228    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

the  Incarnation,  then  the  Incarnation  would  take  place 
again.  Else  the  same  conditions  do  not  lead  to  the 
same  results;  the  same  situations  do  not  receive  the 
same  treatment ;  instead  of  such  an  order  of  the  world 
as  expresses  reason  in  God  and  develops  reason  in 
man,  there  is  pure  arbitrariness  at  the  heart  of  things. 
But  when  all  that  is  granted,  it  is  of  little  use.  For 
as  we  have  just  seen,  the  universe  never  does  thus 
return  temporally  upon  itself  so  that  all  things  become 
absolutely  similar  to  what  they  were  at  some  previous 
time.  One  cross-section  of  the  temporal  process  of 
the  world  is  never  absolutely  similar — given  long  inter- 
vals of  time,  is  never  even  closely  similar — to  any  pre- 
vious cross-section.  That  is  prevented  by  the  mere 
fact  of  time,  of  tradition,  of  memory;  by  the  mere 
fact  of  the  inheritance  of  past  experience  in  conscious 
recollection  and  gathering  character  and  objective  in- 
stitutions. True,  the  whole  of  history  is  for  God  an 
eternal  whole;  else  there  could  be  no  history,  no  time- 
process,  at  all ;  no  succession  of  events  forming  a  single 
intelligible  order.  But  eternity  is  not  a  static  and  life- 
less image.  Its  reality  is  the  reality  of  its  historical 
content;  the  labours  and  struggles  and  achievements 
which  make  up  the  history  of  mankind  or  whatever 
greater  history  there  may  be  in  which  the  history  of 
mankind  is  a  part.  And  in  that  history,  as  was  said, 
God  faces  a  situation  ever  new.  No  doubt  it  is  in- 
volved in  the  very  idea  of  divine  rationality  that  God 
always  would  meet  absolutely  the  same  situation  with 
the  same  procedure.    But  in  a  world-process  which  is 


NATURE  229 

not  mechanical,  but  is  the  experience  and  activity  of 
a  spiritual  society,  identically  the  same  situation  never 
does  recur.  The  continuity  of  such  a  process  is  the 
continuity  of  a  divine  purpose  in  an  unceasing  activity 
of  spiritual  creation;  an  activity  in  which  each  step 
means  to  its  own  extent  a  new  world ;  so  that,  to  repeat 
the  statement  of  a  moment  ago,  God  faces  a  new  situa- 
tion every  day — a  new  situation  with  every  step.  If 
the  world  is  constituted  as  we  have  come  to  believe  it 
to  be,  the  strictest  continuity  prevails  in  its  total  pro- 
cess; and  yet  continually  all  things  are  new;  no  par- 
ticular fact  or  event  ever  occurs,  absolutely  similar, 
in  the  total  system  of  its  relations,  to  a  previous  one. 
It  is  no  argument  against  a  recorded  event,  that  it  is 
viewed  as  having  happened  only  once  in  the  history 
of  the  world.  Such  uniqueness  is  in  greater  or  lesser 
measure  true  of  every  event  whatever,  the  setting  of 
yesterday's  sun,  the  rising  of  the  tide  to-morrow,  the 
yielding  or  the  resistance  of  any  man  to  his  besetting 
temptation.  The  common  denial  of  the  possibility  of 
miracles  assumes  just  the  opposite  of  this.  When  it 
is  said,  for  instance,  that  in  the  nature  of  things  our 
Lord  cannot  have  risen  from  the  dead,  what  is  assumed 
is  that  the  universe  somehow  can  return  in  its  tem- 
poral process  to  a  state  absolutely  similar  to  a  previous 
one;  and  that  it  actually  does  this  so  incessantly  that 
the  exact  things  which  God  did  in  the  days  of  our 
Lord,  He  must  needs  be  now  doing  every  day;  with 
the  consequence  that  from  what  God  is  not  doing  now, 
we  can  infer  what  He  did  not  do  then. 


230    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

But  so  to  argue  from  the  nature  of  things  is  to  mis- 
apprehend the  nature  of  things.  It  is  to  take  the 
world,  either  as  a  closed  system  of  physical  facts  apart 
from  divine  and  human  consciousness,  or  as  a  spiritual 
activity  which  somehow  proceeds  on  a  level,  each  day 
like  the  proceeding.  To  ask  whether,  in  view  of  such 
a  uniformity  of  nature,  we  can  believe  in  the  possi- 
bility of  miracles,  is  to  apply  no  true  test.  With  regard 
to  the  miracles  of  the  New  Testament  the  case  is 
rather  this.  In  the  first  place  we  should  see  them  in 
their  unity;  not  many  separate  events,  but  one  miracle 
whose  importance  lies,  not  in  its  character  as  merely 
wonderful,  but  in  the  fact  that  it  stands  central  and 
creative  in  the  history  of  religion— which  is  to  say,  in 
the  history  of  mankind.  In  the  second  place,  the 
question  whether  such  a  miracle  is  possible  or  no,  is 
really  the  question  whether  it  is  in  accord  with — 
whether  it  is  demanded  by  and  is  organically  part  of — 
the  plan  and  purpose  of  God  as  He  conducts  the  affairs 
of  a  universe  which  is  a  spiritual  and  social  order, 
and  in  which,  therefore,  for  every  divine  act  whatever 
the  determining  conditions  are  ethical.  But  that  far- 
reaching  test  is  incapable  of  exact  or  scientific  appli- 
cation by  human  intelligence ;  it  can  be  employed  only 
in  prophetic  insight  and  religious  feeling.  That  there 
is  a  divine  plan  of  the  world  we  must  indeed  believe; 
but  we  cannot  so  grasp  all  the  details,  all  the  articu- 
lation, of  that  plan,  as  to  see  each  fact  or  event  in  the 
total  system  of  its  relations ;  we  cannot  give  to  the 
facts  of  our  history  their  complete  "divine  interpre- 


NATURE  231 

tation."  We  are  brought,  then,  into  this  position. 
The  only  criterion  that  would  enable  us  to  make  abso- 
lute statements  is  out  of  the  reach  of  our  intellect.  It 
can  be  appealed  to  in  religious  feeling  and  insight;  it 
cannot  be  appealed  to  in  the  way  of  final  and  decisive 
science.  We  must  rule  out  statements  of  this  kind, 
that  such  and  such  a  recorded  event  can  never  in  the 
nature  of  things  have  happened  at  all.  And  when  we 
want  to  know  what  actually  has  happened,  and  desire 
something  more  exact  and  scientific  than  religious  feel- 
ing and  prophetic  insight,  there  is  one  procedure 
always  open  to  us  and  always  relevant ;  the  old- 
fashioned  question,  "Is  this  event  historically  well- 
authenticated?"  We  can  set  to  work  to  weigh  the 
historical  evidence,  doing  our  best  to  estimate  the 
competence  and  good  faith  of  the  witnesses,  but  not 
trying  decisively  to  close  the  case  beforehand  by  gen- 
eral considerations.  We  can,  in  a  word,  obey  the 
lesson  of  that  wise  man  of  science  who  said  that  the 
scientific  spirit  consists  in  a  willingness  to  believe  that 
anything  whatever  can  happen,  coupled  with  the  deter- 
mination not  to  believe,  without  convincing  evidence, 
that  it  actually  has  happened. 

But  in  saying  this  we  must  be  prepared  to  reckon 
with  a  consideration  which  sensible  and  thoughtful 
men  are  sure  to  bring  forward.  "We  admit,"  they 
will  say,  "that  the  sweeping  negative  statements,  con- 
sidered a  moment  ago,  cannot  maintain  themselves. 
We  admit  that  the  decisive  and  final  criterion  whether 
for  negative  or  for  positive  statements,  is  beyond  exact 


232    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

application  by  human  intelligence.  And  hence  we 
grant  that  in  order  to  keep  first  things  first,  we  must 
put  first  the  weighing  of  historical  evidence.  But  it  is 
not  enough  simply  to  weigh  historical  evidence  as  a 
shrewd  judge  of  human  nature  would  weigh  evidence 
in  a  court  of  law.  In  a  matter  of  this  kind,  while 
there  are  no  decisive  considerations  such  as  foreclose 
historical  study,  yet  there  are  strong  antecedent  prob- 
abilities, strong  rational  considerations  for  or  against; 
and  such  considerations  do  weigh,  and  ought  to  weigh, 
with  sensible  men.  Even  in  estimating  historical  evi- 
dence we  cannot  help  considering  the  intrinsic  credi- 
bility or  incredibility  of  the  events  related ;  and  thus 
general  principles,  and  a  general  point  of  view,  do 
enter,  professing  no  absolute  finality  and  yet  influenc- 
ing profoundly  and  inevitably  our  thought."  From 
the  demand  thus  indicated  there  is,  I  think,  no  escape. 
But  we  should  be  careful  to  take  the  right  way,  and 
not  the  wrong,  in  fulfilling  it;  should  be  careful  that 
the  general  considerations  which  influence  our  thought 
consist,  not  in  the  abstract  or  hypothetical  working 
conceptions  of  the  special  sciences  taken  as  finalities, 
but  in  an  insight  into  the  nature  of  things  as  they 
actually  are.  In  other  words,  we  should  regard  the 
world-process  not  merely  as  a  series  of  details  to  be 
treated  in  convenient  divisions  and  under  convenient 
abstractions  by  the  departmental  sciences;  we  should 
regard  it,  in  its  physical  facts  and  in  all  its  facts,  as 
constituted  by  an  eternal  spirit  who  in  constituting  it 
acts  altogether  from  himself  (i.e.  is  free)  and  seeks  to 


NATURE  233 

fulfil  himself  in  the  realising  of  a  purpose  which  ex- 
presses his  very  being.  The  purpose  of  God  is  not 
another  detail  added,  "at  the  top,"  to  the  details  which 
it  is  the  task  of  the  special  sciences  to  investigate;  it 
is  the  creative,  the  animating,  the  unifying  principle, 
which  gives  rise  to  the  details  and  fulfils  itself  in  and 
through  their  total  order;  so  that  in  all  the  special 
sciences  we  are  studying  it,  although  it  is  not  the  busi- 
ness of  those  sciences  to  insist  upon  this  or  even  to  be 
aware  of  it.  To  the  total  scheme  of  natural  facts  and 
laws — or  rather  to  that  total  order  of  which  "nature" 
is  itself  an  organic  part — the  purpose  of  God  is  related 
as,  in  Plato,  the  Idea  of  Good  is  related  to  the  other 
Ideas,  or  as,  in  Hegel,  the  Absolute  Idea  is  related  to 
the  Ideas  which  are  its  organic  constituents  and  which, 
if  taken  merely  in  their  own  right,  are  abstractions. 
So  that  no  reference  to  any  special  law  or  departmental 
uniformity ;  no  reference  to  an  abstract  physical  or 
biological  uniformity,  the  true  significance  of  which 
is  not  fully  seen  until  it  is  seen  in  the  "divine  interpre- 
tation" which  it  is  not  the  concern  of  physics  or  biology 
to  seek;  no  such  reference,  but  on  the  contrary  only 
a  comprehension  of  the  demands  of  that  purpose  of 
God  which  is  the  ultimate  law  of  the  whole  order  of 
nature  and  of  every  natural  event,  can  justify  state- 
ments of  the  form  that  such  and  such  events  cannot 
in  the  nature  of  things  have  happened  at  all.  But  such 
comprehension  of  the  purpose  of  God,  our  reason, 
still  at  the  beginning  of  its  knowledge  of  things,  can 
have  only  in  part.     The  human  mind,  not  being  an 


234    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

intuitive  understanding,  cannot  grasp  the  complete 
divine  interpretation  of  any  particular  event,  the  com- 
plete system  of  the  relations  in  which  the  particular 
event  stands  woven  into  the  total  history  of  the  world. 
Our  apprehension  of  the  divine  purpose,  so  far  from 
being  clear  and  final  science,  is  rather  a  matter  of 
faith;  a  matter  of  prophetic  insight  and  of  that  reli- 
gious feeling  which  means  the  whole  character  of  a 
man,  religious  through  both  his  intelligence  and  his 
emotions,  bringing  itself  to  bear  upon  the  special  prob- 
lems of  his  life.  It  is  by  such  religious  feeling — such 
total  movement  of  the  character  of  men  who  through 
all  their  consciousness  love  God — that  the  ultimate 
problems  of  our  life,  alike  on  their  practical  and 
their  theoretical  side,  best  are  settled.  To  such  a  mind, 
looking  upon  the  world  and  seeing  in  it  a  spiritual 
society  and  spiritual  history  in  which  God  seeks  to 
fulfil  the  purposes  of  His  own  goodness  in  and  through 
the  devotion  of  human  hearts  to  goodness,  the  broad 
antecedent  probabilities  would,  I  think,  seem  in  favour 
of  the  great  body  of  the  New  Testament  miracles ;  or 
rather,  of  the  New  Testament  miracle ;  for,  as  already 
we  have  had  to  remind  ourselves,  there  is  one  New 
Testament  miracle,  the  Incarnation  and  saving  mission 
of  our  Lord,  and  particular  miraculous  actions  have 
their  importance  as  parts  of  it,  or  as  organically  related 
to  it.  This,  however,  leads  beyond  our  present  topic — 
the  bearing  of  our  view  of  nature  upon  the  question 
of  the  possibility  of  miracle.  The  antecedent  proba- 
bility of  such  a  manifestation  and  saving  work  of  God, 


NATURE  235 

as  the  central  and  determinative  event  or  factor  in 
human  history,  appears  in  its  full  strength  only  when 
considered  in  the  light  of  the  grave  and  deep  need  of 
humanity  through  sin.  But  upon  that  I  must  say  what 
I  can  in  the  brief  space  of  to-morrow's  lecture. 

The  most  important  of  all  protests  against  miracle 
and  against  the  mind  given  to  miracles  is  that  made 
for  the  sake  of  religion  itself.  Such  a  protest  was  a 
continual  attitude  on  the  part  of  our  Lord — an  essen- 
tial feature  in  His  establishing  of  inward  and  spiritual 
religion ;  so  that  the  more  fully  developed  the  Christian 
consciousness  becomes  in  the  church,  the  more  acutely 
the  difference  is  felt  between  the  miracles  of  our  Lord 
in  their  simplicity,  their  beneficence,  their  profundity, 
and  the  ecclesiastical  miracles  in  their  riotous  and 
meaningless  abundance.  But  the  characteristic  modern 
protest  against  miracle  is  somewhat  different ;  is  a 
blending  of  truth  and  error.  It  has  truth  enough  in 
it  to  make  it  strong;  error  enough  to  make  it  danger- 
ous. It  arises  in  part  from  that  inadequate  view  of 
nature  the  criticism  of  which  has  just  been  indicated. 
But  it  also  arises  in  part  from  something  deep  and 
true  alike  in  the  religious  and  in  the  scientific  mind ; 
arises  as  a  protest  against  an  idea  of  miracle  really 
as  offensive  to  the  Christian  consciousness  as  to  the 
scientific  mind.  Christian  men  sometimes  defend 
with  a  strange  frenzy  ideas  whose  implications  are 
ruinous  to  Christianity  itself;  and  most  pertina- 
ciously many  a  Christian  man  has  defended  the 
idea    of    miracle    as    an    interference    from    above 


236    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

with  a  regular  order.  With  so  deep  a  violation 
of  the  principle  of  continuity  the  scientific  mind  could 
make  no  terms.  And  the  offence  to  the  Christian 
consciousness  was  really  just  as  deep;  for  the  con- 
ception of  God  involved  was  the  conception  of  a  bun- 
gling workman  who  made  a  system  external  to  himself 
and  was  compelled  at  critical  moments  to  inter- 
fere with  its  regular  working.  But  neither  offence 
was  necessary;  for  the  continuity  of  the  world,  as 
we  have  seen,  is  the  continuity  of  its  divine  plan;  and 
in  the  carrying  out  of  that  plan  every  divine  act — 
every  step  and  stage  in  God's  manifestation  of  Him- 
self, every  step  and  stage  of  His  work  upon  human 
hearts — has  its  definite  place,  its  strictly  organic  con- 
nexion with  all  that  comes  before  or  after.  What- 
ever events  actually  did  happen  in  the  divine  founding 
of  Christianity  stood  in  their  place  in  the  continuity 
of  the  world's  process;  they  were  integral  and  or- 
ganic parts  of  the  divine  plan  of  the  world,  integral 
and  organic  parts  of  the  fulfilment  of  the  purpose  of 
God.  So  far  from  being  lawless,  or  mere  interferences 
on  God's  part  with  a  regular  order  of  the  world,  they 
were  in  the  deepest  sense  lawful ;  as  lawful  as  the 
movements  of  the  tides  or  the  falling  of  the  leaves 
in  autumn ;  in  a  sense,  more  lawful,  because  nearer 
to  the  centre  of  all  law,  more  immediately  expressive 
of  the  divine  purpose  which  is  the  one  supreme  law 
within  and  throughout  that  whole  system  of  natural 
law  into  which  it  has  articulated  itself.  So  far  from 
being  violations  of  continuity  they  are  expressions  of 


NATURE  237 

continuity,  as  being  each  in  its  place  exactly  what  the 
principle  of  continuity  called  for  at  that  place.  The 
way  in  which  the  events  related  in  the  New  Testament 
came  to  be  regarded  as  divine  interferences  with  a 
more  or  less  non-divine  world-order  that  had  a  con- 
tinuity in  its  own  right — a  continuity  which  miracles 
violate — has  in  the  main  been  this.  In  the  first  place, 
men  of  science  inevitably  adopt  the  procedure  which 
we  have  just  had  to  note.  They  take  parts  or  aspects 
of  reality  in  some  degree  of  isolation  from  the  total 
system,  the  total  spiritual  purpose  and  history,  of  the 
world.  They  proceed  as  though  reality  were  a  number 
of  special  spheres,  each  with  a  uniformity  and  con- 
tinuity of  its  own,  a  continuity  mechanical  or  chemi- 
cal or  physiological,  as  the  case  may  be;  a  use  of  the 
principle  of  continuity  abstract  and  provisional,  but 
allowable  because  each  of  the  sciences  in  question  is 
a  limited  inquiry,  intentionally  and  professedly  leaving 
out  of  its  field  of  view  a  great  deal  of  that  total  move- 
ment of  spiritual  reality  which  is  the  history  of  the 
world.  But  then  comes  an  intellectual  trespass  so 
easy  that  it  is  made  not  merely  by  the  light-armed 
guerrillas  who  fight  metaphysical  battles  with  physical 
maxims,  but  by  genuinely  scientific  men.  The  dis- 
tinction between  the  work  of  a  special  science  and  the 
attempt  to  apprehend  the  nature  of  reality  as  a  whole, 
the  attempt  to  apprehend  the  creative  principle  of 
unity  in  the  world  and  thus  to  see  into  the  life  of 
things,  is  overlooked,  and  physics  or  chemistry  or 
biology  becomes  at  one  stroke  metaphysic.    The  rela- 


238    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

tions  of  natural  objects  to  one  another,  as  these  are 
taken  in  the  special  sciences,  are  regarded  as  con- 
stituting the  whole  nature  of  objects,  without  refer- 
ence to  the  spirit  for  which  they  are  objects  and  to 
whose  experience  they  are  organic.  Natural  objects, 
in  other  words,  are  taken  as  constituting  a  world-in- 
itself,  a  realistic  world  in  a  realistic  space  and  time; 
the  laws  and  uniformities  of  that  abstract  world  are 
taken  as  the  uniformities  and  laws  of  all  reality,  in- 
cluding all  that  experience  and  history  of  man  to 
which  the  process  of  nature  is  organic ;  so  that  an 
abstract  or  provisional  miiformity,  a  uniformity  re- 
quiring further  interpretation,  is  treated  as  though  it 
were  the  concrete  continuity  of  the  total  world-order. 
And  then  there  remains  no  choice  but  to  say  of  mir- 
acles, either  that  they  cannot  happen  at  all,  or  else 
are  divine  interferences  with  a  natural  system  in  itself 
closed  and  complete.  Such  views,  once  they  are  held 
by  scientific  men  of  weight  and  power,  gradually  in- 
filtrate popular  thought  and  the  thought  of  the  church. 
The  distinction  is  not  clearly  drawn  between  natural 
science,  which  commands  the  adherence  of  us  all,  and 
"Naturalism,"  a  premature  and  hasty  metaphysic  got 
by  treating  natural  science  as  in  its  methods  and  prin- 
ciples adequate  to  the  total  process  of  reality,  includ- 
ing man's  experience.  Hence  Naturalism  seems  to 
have  the  whole  weight  of  science  behind  it,  and  easily 
becomes  a  sort  of  undetected  and  uncriticised  sub- 
consciousness, operating  unperceived  but  most  effec- 
tively upon   all   our  thought.     Almost   unconsciously 


NATURE  239 

it  becomes  an  organising  point  of  view,  gradually  es- 
tablishing in  our  minds  its  new  interpretation  of  the 
nature  of  the  world  and  of  man's  history,  and  thus 
giving  to  thought  and  life,  both  within  the  church  and 
without,  a  new  complexion  and  a  new  controlling 
centre.  And  this  is  the  easier  that  nowadays  Natur- 
alism seldom  expresses  itself  in  the  old  crass  ways. 
Extreme  materialisms,  mechanical  systems,  accounts 
of  the  whole  of  human  experience  in  terms  of  purely 
biological  evolution,  do  not  so  easily  enchain  men  now 
as  they  did  half  a  century  ago.  It  is  as  a  subtler 
spirit  that  Naturalism  operates  in  popular  thought, 
in  philosophy,  in  theology,  in  historical  and  Biblical 
studies.  It  comes  to  us  as  a  sort  of  intellectual  atmos- 
phere or  fashion.  And  the  intellectual  fashions  of  an 
age  often  have  an  enormous  power,  irrespective  of 
their  intrinsic  strength  or  weakness ;  an  ability  to  pre- 
sent themselves  like  absolute  necessities  of  thought. 
And  that  not  merely  to  weak  and  unstable  minds ;  but 
to  those  also  that  through  sincerity  and  strength  are 
most  open  to  all  the  thought  of  their  day  and  most 
anxious  not  to  be  deniers  of  any  truth.  Frequently, 
too,  in  that  irony  which  waits  upon  criticism,  such  an 
intellectual  tendency  or  fashion  does  but  lead  a  mind 
of  critical  habits  to  expend  its  destructive  power  upon 
the  old,  while  it  accepts  uncritically  and  as  a  matter 
of  course  the  new.  And  as  many  an  unhappy  chapter 
in  the  history  of  theology  shows,  the  Apologist — who 
ought  to  be,  in  the  deep  and  honourable  sense  of  the 
words,    a   mediating   theologian,    a   man    who    knows 


240    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

that  new  truth  fulfils  old  truth  and  who  therefore, 
taking  his  stand  upon  the  old,  welcomes  the  new, 
making  each  interpret  more  deeply  the  other — the 
Apologist,  in  his  eagerness  to  attack  the  specific  con- 
clusions of  those  whom  he  takes  to  be  the  opponents 
of  religion,  frequently  and  without  thought  adopts  pre- 
cisely that  part  of  their  view  which  is  genuinely  and 
permanently  dangerous ;  namely,  their  presuppositions. 
With  regard  to  miracle,  for  instance,  instead  of  detect- 
ing in  a  naively  realistic  view  of  nature  the  root  of 
the  trouble,  many  Apologists  themselves  assume  that 
view  without  thinking  about  it  at  all.  Then  the  belief 
in  miracle  becomes  as  hopeless  to  them  as  it  is  impos- 
sible to  their  opponents,  and  can  be  retained  only  by 
desperate  expedients;  only  by  assuming,  for  instance, 
that  in  the  regular  courses  of  a  nature  which  goes  its 
way  virtually  without  God,  God  interferes  from  above. 
We  should  notice,  too,  that  Naturalism  in  its  more 
refined  forms  can  easily  adjust  itself  to  the  half-way 
Idealism  to  which  reference  was  earlier  made.  That 
Idealism  knows  that  things  are  ideas;  and  therefore 
can  refute  any  gross  form  of  Materialism.  But  it  has 
dwelt  so  exclusively  upon  "ideas"  and  "presentations," 
that  it  has  failed  to  grasp  the  essential  nature  of  the 
principle  which  presents  ideas  to  itself ;  the  essential 
nature  of  spirit  as  self -organising,  self-determining, 
self-realising — self -realising  through  self -communica- 
tion, and  in  that  way  creative  of  a  world  of  freedom. 
Hence,  even  in  asserting  that  there  is  an  eternal  spirit- 
ual source  at  once  of  the  spirit  of  man  and  of  the 


NATURE  241 

objectivity  of  things,  it  fails  to  see  that  God  in  all  His 
communicating  of  Himself  as  the  spirit  of  man,  in  all 
His  giving  rise  to  a  world  and  making  its  history  pos- 
sible, does  so  in  order  to  realise  Himself  through  the 
free  activities  of  the  spirits  whom  He  has  made ;  does 
so  in  order  to  realise  Himself  by  developing  in  man 
spiritual  freedom  and  therefore  genuine  goodness.  It 
does  not  see  that  the  divine  activity  which  is  the 
creation  and  maintenance  of  the  world — the  activity 
in  which  every  natural  fact  has  its  being,  its  place, 
its  function — is  something  more  than  a  presence  of 
ideas  to  God  and  a  communication  of  those  ideas  to 
us ;  is,  namely,  a  free  and  teleological  activity  in  which 
God  seeks  a  realisation  of  Himself  in  the  achieve- 
ments, in  the  duties  and  affections,  of  the  lesser  spirits 
to  whom  He  has  given  life,  and  who  are  capable  of 
those  achievements  and  affections  because  their  divine 
origin  means  just  this,  that  God  communicates  to  them, 
under  whatever  form  of  potentiality,  some  measure 
of  His  own  nature  as  free  and  continuously  creative. 
This  immature  Idealism,  in  a  word,  has  not  grasped 
the  meaning  of  its  own  first  principle.  It  does  not 
see  that  spirit,  as  the  highest  principle  of  the  world, 
means  a  God  who  can  realise  Himself — can  give  to 
His  own  nature  its  appropriate  expression  and  activ- 
ity— only  in  and  through  the  life  of  a  society  of  freely 
creative  spiritual  beings ;  whether  that  society  have  its 
being  eternally,  as  in  the  Trinity ;  or  under  a  form  of 
development,  as  in  the  world.  Hence  such  Idealism 
can  easily  be  brought  into  accord  with  a  naturalistic 


343    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

view  that  has  purified  itself  of  mere  Materialism.  To 
put  it  the  other  way,  the  naturalistic  view  in  that  re- 
fined form  can  easily  express  itself  in  terms  of  such 
Idealism.  It  can  admit  that  a  supreme  spiritual  prin- 
ciple alone  suffices  to  explain  the  process  of  the  world ; 
to  that  extent  it  can  be  explicitly  theistic.  But  whether 
it  is  clearly  conscious  of  the  fact  or  no,  it  really  clings 
to  and  is  controlled  by  the  belief  that  God,  in  all  the 
activity  in  which  He  constitutes  the  world  and  makes 
possible  a  history  of  man,  proceeds  only  in  the  ways 
now  becoming  known  to  us  in  the  physical  and  natural 
sciences ;  ways,  therefore,  which  do  not  go  beyond  the 
bounds  of  those  uniformities  which  our  sciences  of 
nature  are  gradually  learning  to  formulate  as  laws. 
Thus  it  is  possible  for  men  who  hold  with  conviction 
a  spiritual  view  of  the  world,  but  do  not  see  all  that 
their  conviction  means,  to  be  governed  in  their  thought 
by  an  implicit  Naturalism.  Their  Idealism  is  not  what 
Kant  could  have  taught  them  to  make  it — critical ;  and 
critical  in  the  important  sense,  critical  not  of  results 
alone  but  still  more  of  categories  and  working  prin- 
ciples. They  do  not  see  that  working  principles,  used 
legitimately  enough  in  dealing  with  spheres  and  aspects 
of  reality  taken  in  abstraction  from  the  supreme  prin- 
ciple and  ultimate  law  of  all  reality,  require  further 
interpretation  before  being  applied  to  the  process  of 
the  world  as  it  concretely  is  for  God  and  man.  Hence 
they  take  those  principles  to  be  applicable  immediately 
to  reality  as  a  whole  and  in  its  continuity ;  necessarily 
applicable,  therefore,  to  the  life  of  man  in  all  its  con- 


NATURE  243 

tent  and  all  its  relations ;  applicable  to  religion,  and,  in 
religion,  to  the  person  and  the  mission  of  our  Lord. 

But  before  leaving  the  question  of  our  too  easy 
drift  toward  what  one  regretfully  calls  Naturalism — 
narrowing  to  this  poor  use  a  splendid  word — we  ought 
to  remind  ourselves  of  one  thing  further.  The  history 
just  in  question,  as  it  actually  has  been  wrought  out  by 
individual  men,  has  had  a  side  altogether  generous  and 
high,  and,  to  all  except  the  meanest  of  men,  profoundly 
moving  in  its  tragedy.  It  has  been  the  history  of  a 
heart-breaking  sacrifice  made  in  loyalty  to  what  was 
taken  as  the  call  of  truth.  Views  adverse  to  miracle 
came  with  what  seemed  the  whole  weight  of  science 
behind  them.  Hence  it  was  frequently  not  the  weakest 
men  in  the  church  who  yielded  up  the  beliefs  that  had 
been  to  them  the  life  within  their  life;  it  was  very 
often  the  strongest  and  the  sincerest;  the  men  who 
knew  that  the  love  of  God  involves  the  love  of  truth, 
and  who  therefore  felt  most  keenly,  as  part  of  Chris- 
tian virtue,  the  obligation  to  keep  their  minds  open  to 
all  that  came  under  the  form  of  truth,  so  that  from 
God  they  might  receive  His  many  revelations,  deny- 
ing none  and  scorning  none.  If  there  was  fault  or 
guilt,  theirs  was  the  greater  who,  by  giving  place  to 
the  spirit  of  panic  and  the  spirit  of  anger,  drove  the- 
ology from  her  work  of  mediating  and  interpreting 
to  one  another  the  many  sides  of  the  growing  thought 
of  man. 

But  whatever  be  our  judgment  with  regard  to  that, 
we  cannot  well  disagree  upon  this :  that  the  question 


244    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

about  miracle  is  important  only  as  it  is  directly  or 
indirectly  a  question  about  the  one  great  miracle — 
our  Lord  and  His  mission.  If  it  were  merely  a  ques- 
tion concerning  isolated  wonderful  events,  we  should 
indeed  be  foolish  to  give  it  any  central  place  in  our 
thought  about  our  life  and  about  the  way  of  life.  And 
in  a  civilisation  such  as  ours — a  civilisation  haunted 
by  the  ineffectual  and  accusing  shadows  of  the  un- 
skilful and  embittered  poor — the  men  who  are  pos- 
sessed by  the  love  of  God,  the  saints  of  God  who  do 
not  know  themselves  to  be  saints,  if  we  told  them  that 
our  faith  was  bound  up  with  such  a  conception  of 
miracle  and  that  it  was  being  shaken,  would  be  likely 
to  listen  only  for  the  briefest  of  moments ;  but,  in  the 
brief  moment,  they  would  reply  that  there  is  one  reality 
and  it  is  all  miracle;  for  the  reality  of  our  life  is  the 
ever-present  grace  of  God ;  and  that  is  a  continuous 
miracle  and  turns  into  miracle  all  that  it  touches. 

But  in  connexion  with  the  principle  of  the  uni- 
formity of  nature  there  was  a  second  question.  In 
view  of  that  uniformity,  in  view  of  the  invariable- 
ness  of  natural  law,  can  the  prayers  of  Christian  men 
have  any  real  effect  in  bringing  things  to  pass;  any 
real  effect  in  determining  the  course  of  that  which 
day  by  day  is  unfolding  itself  to  us  out  of  the  un- 
known— the  course  of  our  civilisation  upon  the  earth? 

The  bearing  upon  this  of  what  has  already  been 
said  about  nature  and  its  continuity,  can  be  stated 
very  briefly.     But  first  let  us  remember  what  concep- 


NATURE  245 

tion  of  prayer  it  is  that  can  here  come  into  question. 
For  prayer  is  in  its  own  school  continually  trans- 
formed. Of  prayer  as  a  mere  external  means  of 
extorting  from  God  the  objects  of  desires  that  forget 
God;  prayer  whose  petitions  God  can  grant  only  if 
there  be  in  His  administration  of  His  world  a  place 
for  that  sad  disciplinary  wisdom  in  which  parents 
give  to  wilful  children  the  objects  of  their  will; — of 
such  prayer  I  need  not  speak.  But  in  the  prayers  of 
very  many  of  those  who  love  God,  slowly  a  change  is 
wrought.  We  begin  our  life  with  eager  and  impatient 
hearts;  and  in  the  impatience  and  the  eagerness  our 
religion  on  all  its  sides  is  likely  to  share.  Our  plans 
and  hopes  stand  clearly  before  our  minds;  when  dan- 
ger threatens  them,  our  sense  of  the  danger  is  acute 
and  vivid.  The  imminence  of  the  peril,  the  cruelty  of 
the  possible  loss,  the  loveliness  of  that  which  seems 
about  to  be  destroyed,  the  hopelessness  of  a  future 
from  which  those  fair  forms  are  gone,  or  in  which 
those  carefully  formed  plans  are  to  find  no  realisation 
and  have  no  place : — with  pitiless  clearness  all  this  is 
present  to  our  minds,  and  we  hasten  to  God  with 
petitions  most  definite  and  most  urgent.  Just  what 
God  should  do  for  us,  just  what  He  should  do  for 
His  Kingdom  in  this  difficult  and  critical  time,  we  tell 
Him.  And  then  we  wait  for  the  answer;  sometimes 
divided  between  hope  and  fear ;  sometimes  in  that  faith 
which  is  ready  to  think  of  God  as  under  compulsion  to 
reduce  the  whole  system  of  nature  to  anarchy,  when 
our  hearts  are  set  upon  something  that  we  can  have 


246    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

only  through  the  shattering  of  the  natural  order,  and 
we  ask  God  for  it  with  an  undoubting  belief  that  He  is 
going  to  give  it  to  us;  a  view  of  prayer  pathetic  were 
it  not  so  splendid,  pitiable  were  it  not  that  it  is  often 
held  in  that  simplicity  of  heart  which  is  the  root  and 
beginning  of  every  human  excellence.  But  the  God 
to  whom  we  have  prayed  is  greater  than  we.  His 
love  is  a  love  for  individuals ;  but  He  sees  the  part 
in  the  whole,  and  time  as  eternity.  Nature  He  makes 
orderly;  expressing  in  it  His  own  rationality,  and 
thereby  making  possible  for  us  men  the  develop- 
ment of  rational  individuality  in  intelligence,  in  morals, 
in  the  deep  affections  of  a  life  in  which  we  must 
help  one  another  as  we  can  in  the  presence  of 
vast  and  inexorable,  but  not  unintelligible,  forces. 
With  eternal  patience,  with  a  wisdom  beyond  our 
earthly  comprehension.  He  works  out  His  vast  de- 
signs; and  into  those  designs  He  weaves  our  lives; 
so  that  sometimes  the  answer  we  had  so  eagerly 
prayed  for,  comes ;  but  sometimes  does  not  come. 
Does  not  come — because  in  its  place  comes  something 
greater;  something  longer  in  its  process  and  wider 
in  its  issues,  leading  us  out  through  slow  years  into 
fields  of  life  more  sober  in  colour  than  those  we  had 
planned,  but  greater  in  labour  and  deeper  in  truth. 
".  .  .  .  Men  fight,"  as  William  Morris  said,  "and 
lose  the  battle,  and  the  thing  that  they  fought  for 
comes  about  in  spite  of  their  defeat,  and  when  it 
comes  turns  out  not  to  be  what  they  meant,  and  other 
men  have  to  fight  for  what  they  meant  under  another 


NATURE  247 

name."  And  as  this  goes  on,  there  dawns  upon  us — 
sometimes  gradually  and  peacefully,  like  the  deepen- 
ing of  morning  into  day,  but  sometimes  through 
struggle  and  rebellion — the  vision  of  a  wisdom  greater 
than  ourselves,  working  through  the  whole  process 
of  the  world,  active  in  the  total  movement  of  human 
history  and  society.  It  is  the  "hidden  wisdom"  of 
the  world;  it  "reaches  from  end  to  end,  sweetly  and 
strongly  ordering  all  things."  Unfailingly — a  wisdom 
and  power  which  "groweth  not  old" — it  goes  on  its 
way,  and  individual  wills,  individual  plans,  individual 
prayers,  oppose  it  in  vain.  They  can  neither  compel 
it,  nor  persuade  it,  out  of  its  course.  Yet  it  is  not  the 
tyrant  or  the  destroyer  of  the  individual  will.  On 
the  contrary,  the  individual  finds  his  salvation  in  mak- 
ing himself  at  one  with  it;  that  our  lives  can  be  woven 
into  its  design  is  our  one  true  glory  and  our  one  true 
hope.  It  is  not  an  easy  lesson ;  but  as  we  gradually 
learn  it,  our  many  prayers  come  more  and  more  to 
be  special  forms  of  the  one  petition  that  God  will 
fulfil  Himself,  and  that  He  will  grant  to  us  and  to  all 
the  souls  for  whom  it  is  our  duty  to  pray,  the  one  all- 
inclusive  blessing  of  having  a  place  in  His  fulfilment 
of  Himself;  of  being  organs  and  agents  through 
whom  He  achieves  His  eternal  purpose  for  the  world. 
Thus  it  is  that  prayer  in  its  own  school  apprehends 
its  own  principle,  the  principle  which  is  the  vital  nerve 
of  all  saving  religion ;  the  principle  that  the  one  thing 
for  man  to  desire,  the  heart  of  desire  in  all  desires, 
is  that  God  be  fulfilled,  that  God's  will  be  done,  that 


248    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

God's  kingdom  come.  The  centre  of  gravity  of  prayer 
comes  to  be  no  longer  in  ourselves  but  in  God.  All 
the  horizon  of  a  man's  life  changes  upon  him ;  all 
things,  and  all  the  values  of  things  are  referred  to 
God;  more  and  more  the  soul,  as  from  a  high  and 
solemn  place,  surveys  the  whole  of  the  world  as  the 
scene  in  which  God  is  to  be  fulfilled.  Prayer  comes 
less  and  less  to  be  mere  importunity;  the  powerless 
creature  upon  the  earth  begging  things  from  the  all- 
powerful  Creator  in  heaven.  More  and  more  it  comes 
to  be  communion — a  son  talking  with  his  Father  about 
the  things  to  which  both  are  devoted;  though  it  is 
true  enough  that  so  long  as  our  life  upon  the  earth 
remains  the  thing  it  is,  blended  of  hope  and  pain,  of 
glory  and  pitiful  weakness — a  life  in  which  the  strong- 
est are  frail,  and  the  securest  work  of  man  trembles 
over  an  unknown  deep — the  element  of  importunity 
can  never  wholly  cease  from  our  prayers.  But  for  all 
alike,  the  strong,  and  the  weak,  and  those  who  in  their 
weakness  are  the  strongest  of  all,  prayer  that  is  sin- 
cere more  and  more  apprehends  its  own  nature ;  more 
and  more  becomes  genuinely  religious  and  a  part  of 
genuine  religion.  And  as  it  does  so  it  becomes  more 
and  more  a  school  of  character.  At  first  in  our  im- 
patient and  urgent  prayers — prayers  that  almost  are 
ready  to  set  aside  God's  way  with  the  world  if  only 
our  way  may  prevail — prayer  is  only  to  a  limited  extent 
a  discipline  and  purification  of  the  soul ;  now  and  then 
the  sense  of  God's  presence  and  of  the  wisdom  which 
with  Him  is  love,  rebukes  the  narrowness,  or  the  folly, 


NATURE  24& 

or  the  selfishness,  of  the  petitions  that  we  press  upon 
Him.  But  when  prayer  becomes  truly  itself,  becomes 
a  genuine  companionship  of  the  soul  with  God,  the 
divine  nature  is  always  drawing  the  human  nature 
upward  toward  itself.  It  is  the  pure  in  heart  who  see 
God;  and  the  hearts  that  strive  to  see  God  become 
pure.  The  last  and  highest  result  of  prayer  is  not  the 
securing  of  this  or  that  gift,  the  avoiding  of  this  or 
that  danger.  The  last  and  highest  result  of  prayer 
is  the  knowledge  of  God — the  knowledge  which  is 
eternal  life ;  and  by  that  knowledge  the  transformation 
of  human  character  and  of  the  world. 

But  our  question  here  is  a  very  limited  one.  In 
view  of  what  nature  is,  can  such  prayer  be  effective 
in  determining  the  only  thing  that  is  open  to  us  to 
determine  and  that  is  worth  determining;  the  course 
of  our  life,  the  course  of  the  civilisation  whose  present 
movement  is  upon  the  earth?  If  reality  is  what  we 
have  come  to  believe  it  to  be — a  society  of  spiritual 
beings,  with  nature  as  a  form  of  that  self-communi- 
cating activity  of  God  in  which  spiritual  society  has 
its  origin  and  its  life — the  answer  is  plain.  If  the  life 
of  the  universe  is  thus  the  life  of  a  spiritual  society, 
and  to  that  life  nature  through  all  her  system  is  or- 
ganic, prayer  is  in  accord  wath  the  intrinsic  reality  of 
things;  in  accord  with  the  intrinsic  reality  of  nature 
itself.  What  is  really  going  on  in  all  the  actual  pro- 
cess of  the  world  is  inter-communication  between  God 
and  His  created  spirits.  Such  inter-communication  is 
the  reality  of  all  the  activities  which  make  up  the  his- 


250    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

tory  of  the  world.  It  is  the  one  concrete  activity  in 
which,  whether  the  finite  agents  know  it  or  not,  and 
whether  they  play  their  parts  worthily  or  unworthily, 
all  particular  activities  have  their  being  and  their  signi- 
ficance. Directly  or  indirectly,  worthily  or  unworthily, 
all  events  that  happen — not  only  decisions  and  devo- 
tions and  aspirations  in  the  heart  of  man,  but  all  those 
things  that  we  call  natural, 

Fire  and  hail,  snow  and  vapour; 
Stormy  wind  fulfilling  his  word, 

— are  elements  in  such  a  process  of  inter-communica- 
tion. And  the  essential  thing  that  God  is  seeking  to 
bring  about,  as  at  once  the  fulfilment  of  Himself  in 
His  creative  activities,  the  fulfilment  of  man,  the  ful- 
filment of  nature  in  man,  can  only  be  that  that  inter- 
communication, dark  with  man's  unconsciousness, 
made  into  tragedy  by  man's  sin,  may  be  lifted  to  the 
level  of  conscious  and  aflfectionate  communion,  the 
communion  of  the  Father  with  the  family  of  His 
children.  But  that  is  what  prayer  is ;  a  communion 
conscious,  searching,  personal,  intimate.  It  is  religion 
at  its  clearest  consciousness  of  itself ;  which  is  to  say, 
it  is  our  very  life,  our  very  being,  at  its  clearest  con- 
sciousness of  itself.  It  is  in  such  communion,  it  is  in 
the  life  of  which  such  communion  is  the  inner  aspect, 
that  man  is  most  truly  faithful  to  the  divinely  origi- 
nated and  divinely  intended  reality  of  his  own  being 
and  of  the  world's  being.  It  is  in  such  communion 
and  such  life  that  man  most  truly  realises  himself  by 


NATURE  251 

making  himself  most  truly  an  organ  in  the  self-fulfil- 
ment of  God.  So  that  to  ask  whether  prayer  is  effec- 
tive is  like  asking  whether  it  is  effective  to  be  ahve 
unto  God;  effective  to  realise  one's  true  being  and  to 
fulfil  one's  divine  vocation.  In  fact  it  is  only  when 
we  fall  unconsciously  into  the  mistake  of  regarding 
prayer  as  something  external  to  the  communion  of  the 
Christian  man  with  God — or  into  the  still  more  radical 
mistake  of  regarding  that  communion  itself  as  some- 
thing external  to  the  essential  life  of  humanity  and 
of  nature — that  we  raise  this  question  of  the  effec- 
tiveness of  prayer  at  all.  It  is  Hke  asking  whether 
it  is  effective  for  reality  to  be  real,  or  for  life  to  live. 
The  essential  will  of  the  Christian  man  is  that  in  all 
the  ways  of  the  world  God  may  fulfil  Himself;  in 
pursuance  of  that  will,  the  Christian  man  gives  his 
loyalty  to  those  causes  of  human  welfare  in  which 
the  heart  of  man  gradually  has  been  learning  to  articu- 
late and  make  definite  its  longing  for  God  and  for 
good.  When  such  a  man  brings  before  God  all  things 
of  his  life — all  the  things  his  heart  fears,  all  the  things 
his  heart  desires — the  doubt  is  not  whether  such  prayer 
is  effective ;  the  doubt  is  whether  there  is  in  the  world 
any  other  permanently  effective  force  than  such  prayer 
and  the  life  that  is  lived  in  the  spirit  of  such  prayer. 
The  energies  of  which  prayer  is  the  type  or  the  spirit, 
are  the  only  energies  capable  of  anything  that  from 
the  divine  or  eternal  point  of  view  can  be  called  real 
achievement  at  all.  And  that  not  in  some  abstract  or 
exclusive  sense,  but  inclusively  and  concretely.    What 


253    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

we  commonly  think  of  as  effective  forces — masses 
moving  in  space,  energies,  ambitions,  passions — are 
appearances,  the  reahty  of  which  it  is  the  long  and  slow 
struggle  of  humanity  to  apprehend;  and  when  that 
reality  of  them  is  apprehended,  the  reality  of  the  sys- 
tem in  which  they  have  their  being,  it  consists  in 
spiritual  purposes  articulating  themselves  into  a  world. 
In  such  a  world,  the  laws  of  effectiveness  are  in  the 
last  analysis  laws  of  spiritual  effort  and  spiritual 
achievement ;  and  in  spiritual  effort  and  achievement 
prayer  is  in  a  central  place.  It  is  to  emphasise  but  one 
of  the  many  sides  of  this,  to  say  that  if  there  is  a 
preaching  which  has  power  to  save,  a  preaching  which 
is  creative  of  new  life  and  leads  toward  new  heavens 
and  a  new  earth,  it  is  the  preaching  whose  end,  as 
George  Herbert  says,  is  praying;  and  praying  can  be 
its  end  only  as  prayer  is  its  beginning;  only  as  it  is 
the  expression  of  souls  that  have  their  life  with  God. 

These,  however,  were  special  problems,  discussed 
in  order  to  bring  out  more  fully  the  significance  of  a 
general  position ;  the  position  that  the  history  of  the 
world  is  a  spiritual  process,  and  nature  a  factor  there- 
in, as  a  form  or  medium  of  the  divine  self-communi- 
cation in  which  is  given  to  man  his  life  and  growth; 
and  that  there  is  thus  a  unity  of  the  religious  and  the 
rational  consciousness  with  regard  to  nature.  They 
are  one,  not  in  the  sense  that  the  Christian  conscious- 
ness has  necessarily  a  correct  detailed  science  of 
nature;  but  in  the  sense  that  the  view  which  reason 


NATURE  253 

takes  of  the  ultimate  character  of  natural  facts,  is  in 
harmony  with  the  way  in  which  the  thoroughly  Chris- 
tian soul  receives  to  itself,  and  sanctifies,  the  natural 
facts  with  which  and  in  which  we  must  live  our  life, 
if  we  are  to  live  in  this  world  at  all ;  with  which  and 
in  which  we  must  have  a  communion  with  God,  unless 
God  has  a  lower  place  in  His  own  universe  than  the 
Christian  consciousness  takes  Him  to  have. 

To-morrow  we  have  to  consider,  though  it  can  be 
only  in  the  way  of  brief  suggestion,  that  gravest  and 
saddest  problem  of  our  life,  which  in  all  our  difficulties 
is  the  root  of  difficulty.  The  ability  to  cast  light  upon 
it  is  to  all  our  theologies  and  philosophies  the  article 
of  standing  or  of  falling. 


IV 

Freedom,  Sin  and  Redemption 

The  view  now  before  us  is  that  the  soul  of  man  has 
its  origin  and  growth,  and  the  history  of  which  the 
soul  of  man  is  the  author,  the  basis  of  its  possibility, 
in  a  self-communicating  activity  on  the  part  of  God. 
It  is  a  view  of  what,  for  want  of  some  better  term, 
must  be  called  the  organic  connexion  of  God,  the  soul 
of  man,  and  the  natural  world;  the  soul  of  man  a  self- 
impartation,  under  whatever  limits,  on  the  part  of 
God;  the  natural  world  the  medium  of  that  imparta- 
tion.  So  that  we  are  in  principle  one  with  God  and 
with  His  world,  sons  of  God,  even  though  prodigal 
sons ;  we  are  potentially — not  actually — at  one  with 
God  and  with  nature.  And  in  the  fact  that  there  is 
such  a  potentiality  for  us  to  make  actual,  lies  our  eter- 
nal hope :  our  hope  of  a  life  that  time  and  death  cannot 
defeat;  our  hope — if  we  have  brought  ourselves  to  a 
place  where  our  faces  are  turned  away  from  God — of 
salvation. 

How  this  view  is  held  implicitly  in  religious  feeling 
and  faith,  how  as  so  held  it  operates  in  practice,  we 
have  already  seen.  Here  we  are  concerned  with  it  as 
an  hypothesis  of  reason,  a  way  of  accounting  for  the 
actual  form  and  course  of  our  life  upon  the  earth,  our 
many-sided  life  in  time  and  with  nature.  As  such  an 
hypothesis,  it  is  accepted  on  the  only  ground  on  which 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  REDEMPTION    255 

any  hypothesis,  not  subject  to  complete  experimental 
verification,  is  accepted :  it  holds  the  facts  together  in 
a  single  intelligible  view.  It  cannot  be  "proved,"  in  the 
sense  that  we  should  get  outside  of  our  experience, 
and  look  down  upon  experience  to  see  which  of  the 
views  about  it  is  true.  Such  proof  is  out  of  question. 
But  up  to  the  point  which  we  have  now  reached,  this 
view  of  the  possibility  and  the  universal  relations  of 
our  experience,  meets  the  only  test  applicable  to  such 
views,  the  test  already  cited  from  Mr.  Bradley :  it  holds 
together  and  it  holds  the  facts  together.  It  is  self- 
consistent;  and  it  makes  the  facts  of  our  experience 
more  intelligible  than  they  were  before,  by  showing 
how  they  go  together  in  a  single  reasonable  system. 
That  there  are  difificulties  does  not  necessarily  close 
the  case.  In  this  region  of  inquiry  there  can,  in  our 
life  upon  the  earth,  be  no  view  without  difficulties. 
The  question  of  accepting  or  rejecting  a  view  of  this 
kind  is  not  so  much  the  mere  question,  Are  there  diffi- 
culties in  it?  Rather  the  question  is :  By  giving  up  this 
view,  will  the  difficulties  be  lessened — or  increased? 

The  view  now  before  us  does  seem,  up  to  this  point, 
to  "hold  together"  the  facts  of  our  life.  It  makes 
intelligible  to  us  how  our  spirits — certainly  not  their 
own  creators  and  sustainers — come  to  be.  It  makes 
intelligible  to  us  that  continual  increment  of  our  being 
which  is  the  development  of  our  consciousness  and 
our  growth  in  experience,  giving  us  an  adequate  source 
both  of  our  increase  in  being  and  of  the  "external"  or 
"natural"  conditions  under  which,  in  knowledge  and 


256    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

in  practice,  that  increase  takes  place.  Above  all,  it 
meets  what,  so  far  as  we  have  now  come,  is  the  cen- 
tral difficulty  of  theories  about  the  source  and  univer- 
sal relations  of  our  experience:  it  shows  how,  alike 
in  the  intellectual  and  in  the  practical  aspect  of  our 
life,  that  increase  in  our  being  takes  place  as  we 
actually  apprehend  it  to  take  place;  by  growth  from 
within,  by  the  exercise  of  free  or  inner  energies,  and 
not  by  external  or  mechanical  necessity,  such  as  holds 
in  the  case  of  a  "thing"  merely  manufactured,  or  of 
a  "mode"  altogether  determined  by  its  place  and  con- 
nexion in  the  system  of  the  modes  of  a  unitary  Sub- 
stance or  Being.  Upon  the  view  that  we  have  our 
origin  and  our  continuance  of  life  in  a  reproduction 
of  himself,  a  continuous  self-communication,  on  the 
part  of  an  Absolute  Spirit,  we  can  understand  how 
our  experience  is  what  in  our  consciousness  of  our- 
selves we  find  it  to  be;  not  merely  a  series  of  feelings 
and  sensations,  determined  in  their  succession  and 
combinations  by  some  alien  or  impersonal  necessity; 
but  an  active  process,  animated  from  within  by  im- 
plicit but  effectively  operative  ideals,  in  whose  opera- 
tion we  apprehend  an  objective  world  and  have  con- 
tinual commerce  with  it;  the  commerce,  intellectual 
and  practical,  which,  as  industry  and  science,  as  mo- 
rality and  religion,  is  the  history  of  our  civilisation,  and 
in  which  the  capabilities  of  the  spirit  of  man  are  by 
that  spirit's  own  energies  gradually  realised.  So  far 
as  we  have  come,  then,  this  view  seems  to  make  intel- 
ligible how  our  experience  is  possible.    To  repeat  once 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  REDEMPTION    257 

more  the  enumeration  which  I  have  already  repeated 
so  often  with  the  purpose  of  making  it  clear  that  the 
view  before  us  is  concrete  in  its  principle  and  not 
abstract,  it  makes  intelligible  to  us  how  science  is 
possible,  and  art  and  morality  and  religion;  and  all 
that  ordinary  life  in  which  art  and  science,  morals  and 
religion,  the  mastery  of  nature  and  the  devotion  of 
the  self  to  goodness  and  to  God,  are  already  present, 
but  present  in  unsystematic  and  uncritical  form. 

But  how  far  does  this  go  ?  Does  it  extend  to  all  the 
great  main  factors  of  our  life?  Of  course  we  cannot 
look  for  the  complete  rationalising  of  all  the  particular 
facts  and  events  of  our  life,  by  this  hypothesis  or  any 
hypothesis.  But  leaving  that  aside  as  demanding  a 
perfection  of  knowledge  possible  only  to  God,  we 
must  still  ask  whether  the  view  now  before  us  ration- 
alises— holds  together  in  one  intelligible  grasp — all  the 
great  constituent  factors  of  our  life.  I  think  it  does ; 
and  does  so  prima  facie; — with  one  appalling  excep- 
tion. That  exception  is  the  central  difficulty  of  this 
view  of  the  world  and  of  every  view  of  the  world 
whatsoever.  It  seems  to  break  the  back  of  every  pos- 
sible hypothesis ;  because  it  seems  decisively  and  abso- 
lutely to  shiver  the  unity  of  the  real  world,  and  thereby 
to  destroy  at  one  stroke  all  possibility  of  any  such 
view  of  the  world  as  is  craved  by  reason  through  all 
its  being  and  is  implied  in  any  religion  in  which  men 
give  their  hearts  to  a  supreme  God.  The  conflict 
between  good  and  evil  seems  a  strife  between  abso- 
lutely antagonistic  principles  in  ourselves  and  in  the 


258    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

order  of  the  world.  Such  a  division  seems,  as  was 
said,  to  break  the  back  of  the  theistic  view  of  the 
world;  seems  in  fact  to  block  the  way  against  every 
possible  unitary  and  synthetic  view  of  the  world  and 
to  drive  us  to  some  form  or  other  of  that  intellectual 
despair  in  which  we  give  up  the  belief  that  the  prin- 
ciple and  energy  of  the  universe  is  one  and  supreme, 
spiritual  and  righteous,  and  admit  that  it  is  either  a 
non-moral  energy,  so  that  the  greater  half  of  our  life 
is  illusion;  or  is  dualistic — a  power  of  evil  co-eternal 
with  the  good;  or  is  simply  inscrutable. 

In  the  presence  of  this  difficulty  many  attitudes  are 
taken  up.  One  of  the  most  common,  and  certainly 
one  of  the  most  admirable,  is  that  of  the  man  who 
has  no  solution  that  he  can  present  to  his  intelligence, 
but  who  has  no  doubt  about  continuing  to  put  his 
trust  in  God.  He  does  not  affirm  that  there  is  no  solu- 
tion; nor  does  he  deny  that  his  own  faith  in  God 
implies  both  that  there  is  a  solution,  and  that  it  lies 
in  a  certain  direction  and  not  in  others.  But  he  sees 
no  possibility  of  making  the  solution  intellectually 
clear  to  himself,  and  feels  that  he  must  be  content  to 
stand  fast  with  his  trust  in  God.  For  him  it  is  good 
to  lay  hold  upon  God,  even  though  the  hands  that  reach 
up  to  God  are  "blind  hands  of  faith." 

Apparently  similar  to  this,  but  in  reality  immensely 
different,  is  the  position  of  those  who  declare,  simply 
and  roundly,  that  the  problem  is  insoluble;  radically 
and  finally  insoluble ;  so  that  the  attempt  to  deal  with 
it  is  at  once  profitless  and  presumptuous.     This  dog- 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  REDEMPTION    259 

matic  attitude — the  attitude  of  the  man  who  will  be 
a  theologian  but  is  determined  (whether  he  puts  it  to 
himself  in  this  way  or  no)  to  evade  the  theologian's 
gravest  intellectual  responsibility — ought  at  least  to 
be  seen  in  its  true  light.  It  implies  that  theology  as 
a  whole  is  impossible.  For  it  throws  over  into  unin- 
telligibility  the  central  and  fundamental  questions  of 
theology :  the  purpose  of  God  in  His  creative  activity ; 
the  relation  of  that  purpose  to  the  present  order  of 
the  world  wherein  evil  is  real;  the  fulfilment  of  it  in 
the  process  of  human  salvation.  It  is  true  enough 
that  many  mystics,  many  saints,  have  made — not  by 
implication,  but  openly,  expressly,  and  with  indignant 
rebuke — this  same  denial  of  the  possibility  of  theology ; 
and  have  done  the  world  service  thereby.  But  after 
making  that  denial,  they  did  not  go  on  to  build  up 
systems  of  theology.  If  we  are  to  be  students  of 
theology  at  all,  it  is  a  matter  of  scientific  integrity  not 
to  evade  the  attempt  to  deal  as  best  we  can  with  this 
hardest  and  saddest  of  all  questions ;  however  miser- 
able in  the  way  of  insight  be  the  result.  And  for  us 
at  the  present  point  that  obligation  assumes  a  special 
form :  we  have  a  view  of  the  world  before  us  in  part, 
and  must  ask  whether  it  can  complete  itself  by  cast- 
ing any  light  upon  this  ultimate  problem. 

Some  light,  I  think,  we  may  look  for.  We  are 
justified  at  any  rate  in  regarding  the  problem  from 
the  outset  with  hope  rather  than  with  mere  despair; 
justified  by  reasons  which  are  compelling  just  because 
they  are  elementary.    In  the  first  place,  no  matter  how 


260    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

terrible  the  pressure  of  the  facts  of  evil  and  sin,  we 
cannot  give  up  the  belief  in  the  unity  of  the  w^orld. 
To  give  up  that  belief  is  to  give  up  the  fundamental 
instinct  and  principle  of  all  science,  all  philosophy,  all 
theology;  of  all  thinking  whatsoever,  even  of  that 
which  seeks  to  establish  scepticism.  It  is  to  make  a 
surrender  which  we  are  really  not  capable  of  making. 
And  if  we  imagine  that  we  have  made  it,  and  have 
given  ourselves  up  to  scepticism — scepticism  with  or 
without  limits — really  we  have  not  made  it.  Our  minds 
go  on  working  as  they  worked  before,  with  this  prin- 
ciple of  the  unity  of  all  facts  in  a  single  system  as 
their  fundamental  category.  It  is  but  putting  this  in 
another  form  to  say  that  scepticism — the  theologian's 
as  well  as  any  other — is  intrinsically  self -contradic- 
tory. It  knows  the  nature  of  things  well  enough  to 
know  that  the  nature  of  things  cannot  be  known.  In 
the  act  of  setting  limits  to  knowledge,  it  transcends  the 
limits  that  it  sets ;  in  denying  the  power  of  the  mind, 
it  relies  on  the  power  of  the  mind.  And  as  with  scep- 
ticism, so  with  that  arrested  step  on  the  way  to  it — 
dualism.  Neither  the  man  of  natural  science  nor  the 
theologian  can  say,  without  destroying  in  ultimate 
analysis  the  fabric  of  his  own  thought,  that  there  are 
two  eternal  principles  of  the  world-order,  one  good, 
the  other  evil  or  indifferent  to  good ;  two  gods,  one 
good,  the  other  an  evil  power  over  against  God,  able 
to  interfere  decisively  with  the  work  and  plan  of  God 
and  to  hold  in  its  grip  to  all  eternity  the  children  of 
God  won  from  Him  by  that  interference.     But  that 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  REDEMPTION    361 

is  putting  the  matter  negatively.  The  positive  side 
of  it  is  seen  in  the  actual  working  of  this  intellectual 
and  spiritual  compulsion  in  the  minds  of  men  through 
all  their  generations ;  the  actual  working  of  it  in  their 
faith,  in  their  scientific  labour  that  has  never  acknowl- 
edged defeat,  in  their  institutions  and  the  continuity 
of  their  effort  after  civilisation.  Good  men  and 
thoughtful  men  in  their  long  succession  upon  the  earth 
really  hold — or  rather,  hold  to — a  solution  of  the  prob- 
lem of  evil.  On  the  theoretical  side,  the  fact  that 
science  and  philosophy  and  theology  maintain  their 
effort  at  all,  and  for  ages  have  maintained  their  effort, 
indicates  that  neither  this,  nor  any  other,  of  the  chief 
factors  and  elements  of  our  life  is  felt  to  constitute 
a  hopelessly  insoluble  problem.  And — what  is  im- 
mensely more  important — on  the  practical  side  the 
position  is  the  same.  The  fact  that  morality  and  reli- 
gion govern  our  life  at  all — the  fact  that  they  hold 
their  power  over  us  even  in  the  absence  of  anything 
like  an  absolute  overcoming  and  destruction  of  evil — 
means  that  good  men,  religious  men,  though  they  may 
.  never  have  formulated  intellectually  their  belief,  yet 
really  hold  the  belief,  really  live  and  work  in  the 
belief,  that  the  problem  is  not  insoluble.  And  the  good- 
ness here  in  question,  or  the  religion,  is  not  that  of  the 
men  alone  who  make  the  great  ventures  of  the  human 
spirit;  it  is  that  common  goodness  of  common  men 
which  is  to  society  its  preservative  force,  its  broad- 
based  and  enduring  strength.  Furthermore,  unless  an 
absolute  separation  is  made  between  the  intellectual 


262    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

and  the  practical  nature  of  man — and  with  the  man 
who  makes  that  separation  absolute,  no  common 
ground  of  argument  is  left — it  is  an  absurdity  to  hold 
that  a  problem  can  be  solved  in  the  practical  life,  but 
is  insoluble  theoretically.  A  problem  that  can  be 
solved  in  the  practical  life  cannot  be  completely  and 
decisively  hopeless  for  the  intelligence.  The  theologian 
who  should  see  men  standing  face  to  face  with  this 
last  sad  mystery  of  their  life;  and  with  no  scruple, 
but  feeling  himself  indubitably  and  splendidly  in  the 
right,  should  urge  upon  their  wills  and  affections  a 
way  of  salvation ;  but  then  should  forbid  to  their 
intelligence  the  reflective  possession  and  use  of  the 
principles  involved  in  that  salvation : — such  a  theolo- 
gian surely  is  unfaithful  to  theology.  We  separate 
religion  from  reason,  and  reason  from  religion,  if  we 
declare  (what  the  experience  of  innumerable  men  vin- 
dicates us  in  declaring)  that  Christian  love  and  faith 
enable  men  to  solve  in  the  practical  life  the  problem 
of  evil;  declare  that  there  is  a  grace  of  God  which 
makes  that  practical  overcoming  of  evil — of  evil 
where,  as  sin,  it  is  most  truly  and  grievously  evil — to 
every  man  a  possibility,  a  duty,  a  vocation ;  and  then 
declare  that  the  problem  of  evil  is  hopelessly  insol- 
uble. And  the  lack  of  unity  with  ourselves  becomes 
formal  contradiction,  if  we  declare  the  problem  of  evil 
thus  utterly  hopeless,  and  then  go  on  to  lay  down  a 
systematic  soteriology ;  for  the  doctrine  of  salvation 
cannot  be  systematically  clear — nay,  must  be  altogether 
obscure — if   the  ultimate   nature  and   significance,   if 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  REDEMPTION    263 

the  eternal  relations,  of  that  from  which  we  are  to  be 
saved,  stand  wrapped  in  a  darkness  absolute  and  im- 
penetrable. To  put  it  conversely,  a  systematic  sote- 
riology  has  implicit  in  it  the  assumption  that  the  prob- 
lem of  evil  can  be  solved  and  that  a  certain  solution 
is  the  true  one.  This  is  a  consideration  binding  upon 
those  who  believe  in  the  possibility  of  theology,  as  a 
systematic  insight  into  the  ways  of  God  with  man.  It 
is  not  a  compulsion  upon  all  the  hearts  that  love  God 
to  give  up  their  trust  in  God,  unless  they  are  able  to 
formulate  that  trust  into  a  satisfactory  theology.  It 
means  that  our  nature  is  not  so  divided  as  to  compel 
us  to  a  choice  between  the  intellectual  insight  of  the 
theologian  and  the  love  and  faith  of  the  saints.  If 
we  were  compelled  to  that  choice,  we  should  do  well 
to  take  as  our  own,  even  in  this  sadly  narrowed  sense, 
the  ancient  prayer  that  God  would  make  us  to  be 
numbered  with  His  saints.  But  there  is  a  greater 
hope:  that  such  a  choice  is  not  inevitable;  that  the 
Christian  religion  may  appeal,  as  to  the  heart  of  man, 
so  to  his  reason,  and  as  to  his  reason,  so  to  his  heart; 
so  that  the  whole  man,  and  the  whole  life  of  man, 
may  in  that  religion  be  drawn  to  God. 

Nay,  there  has  been  more  than  such  a  greater  hope. 
There  has  been  a  greater  actual  history  in  which  that 
choice  has  not  been  inevitable ;  in  which  the  Christian 
religion  has  appealed,  as  to  the  heart  of  man,  so  to 
his  reason,  and  as  to  his  reason,  so  to  his  heart;  in 
which  the  whole  man,  and  the  whole  life  of  man,  have 
in  religion  been  drawn  to  God.    In  that  life  with  God, 


264    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

on  the  one  hand  sin  has  been  overcome  in  the  power 
of  love  and  faith;  on  the  other  hand  the  ideas  that 
have  lain  implicit  in  Christian  practice  have  gradually 
made  their  way  to  consciousness,  and  have  constituted 
for  the  intelligence  at  least  the  beginning  and  promise 
of  a  solution  of  this  ultimate  problem.  So  that  instead 
of  saying  that  the  problem  is  utterly  insoluble ;  instead 
of  saying  that  the  faith  in  which  the  church  under- 
takes the  conquest  of  the  world,  and  in  which  every 
Christian  man  endeavours  to  make  the  will  and  the 
way  of  God  prevail  in  his  own  society,  is  a  faith, 
strong  it  may  be,  but  blind,  a  reaching  out  of  desperate 
hands  that  can  but  grope  in  the  dark ;  instead  of  saying 
that  the  work  which  the  church,  with  such  long  and 
passionate  devotion  of  intelligence,  has  attempted  to 
do  in  constructive  theology,  is  a  labour  lost; — instead 
of  all  this,  we  ought  rather  to  say  that  the  spirit  of 
man,  in  the  individuals  and  races  where  it  most  does 
itself  justice — above  all  in  its  highest  and  clearest 
possession  of  itself  in  Christian  love  and  faith — holds 
implicitly  the  beginnings  of  a  solution ;  beginnings  that 
are  at  least  promising  enough  to  enable  both  our  intel- 
ligence and  our  faith  to  meet  undefeated  this  last  ap- 
palling question  of  our  life.  And  the  insight  thus  held 
in  the  activities  and  devotions  of  religion  has  not 
failed  of  some  measure  of  explicit  formulation.  The 
Christian  church,  in  its  work  of  bringing  human  prac- 
tice to  the  highest  possible  level,  has  never  been  merely 
practical ;  had  it  been  so,  it  had  made  the  greatest  of 
practical   failures.     Rather  it  has  been,   in  the  very 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  REDEMPTION    365 

nature  of  the  case,  at  once  intensely  practical  and  in- 
tensely reflective.  In  spite  of  the  dogmatic  spirit,  in 
spite  of  the  atrophy  not  of  charity  alone  but  of  intel- 
ligence, which  arises  when  the  high  faith  that  trusts 
God  and  welcomes  all  truth  is  gone  and  in  its  place 
have  come  unworthy  fear  and  unworthy  hate — in  spite 
of  these,  the  Christian  church  has  been  the  home  of 
a  rational  reflexion  as  penetrating,  as  critical,  as  intent 
upon  truth,  as  any  reflexion  that  ever  has  had  its  being 
in  the  courts  of  pure  science.  As  critical,  as  pene- 
trating, as  truthful  in  spirit;  and  better  provided;  for 
the  thoughts  with  which  it  worked  were  not  mere 
thoughts,  beating  their  wings  in  the  void;  they  were 
the  moving  ideas  of  a  great  experience.  If  we  are  to 
become  possessed  at  all  of  ideas  and  categories  by 
which  we  can  conceive  the  universal  relations  of  the 
experience  which  is  our  life,  where  should  those  ideas 
be  suggested  to  us,  where  should  they  dawn  upon  us 
and  develop  to  awareness  of  themselves,  if  not  in  the 
active  consciousness  which  is  religion ;  the  active  con- 
sciousness in  which  our  experience  is  concentrated  into 
the  acutest  sense  of  its  own  meaning  as  a  dealing  with 
God,  and  into  the  endeavour  to  fashion  the  world 
according  to  that  meaning? 

When  we  ask,  then,  about  the  actual  status  of  this 
problem — when  we  ask  how  mankind  actually  has 
faced,  actually  is  facing  it — the  evident  reply  is  that 
the  Christian  mind,  from  its  beginning  and  in  the  very 
nature  of  its  life,  has  had  in  implicit  possession  and 
to  some  extent  in  explicit  consciousness,  ideas  which 


266    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

constitute  at  least  the  beginning  "of  an  answer.  These 
form  the  last  step,  or  ultimate  synthesis,  in  a  view  of 
the  world  which  on  the  one  hand  lies  implicit  in  the 
religious  consciousness,  and  in  which  on  the  other 
hand  the  rational  consciousness  has,  so  far  as  I  can 
judge,  its  satisfaction  and  its  rest.  It  is  only  in  the 
light  of  this  last  step  that  that  view  as  a  whole,  or  any 
part  of  it,  appears  in  its  full  significance  as  an  attempt 
to  apprehend  the  universal  relations  of  our  experience 
and  to  make  clear  how  such  a  thing  as  our  experience 
upon  the  earth  is  possible  at  all. 

The  chief  of  these  ideas  I  must  now  attempt,  as  best 
I  can,  to  set  down.  As  we  go  on  to  consider  them,  we 
should  first  recall  the  insights  of  which  they  are  the 
extension  and  completion :  the  insights  already  before 
us  concerning  creation  and  God's  expression  of  Him- 
self in  creation.  The  universe — that  whole  of  reality 
in  which  our  experience  has  its  being — is  a  spiritual 
society :  God,  the  supreme  or  absolute  spirit,  who  acts 
altogether  from  Himself,  and  in  all  that  He  does  fulfils 
His  own  nature  in  its  spirituality  and  freedom;  and 
the  lesser  spirits.  His  children,  to  whom  He  gives  rise 
by  some  communication,  however  limited,  of  Himself. 
The  society  or  family  of  those  lesser  spirits  it  is,  which 
is  in  the  proper  sense  of  the  word  God's  creation ;  a 
creation  gradually  being  realised  or  achieved  by  a  con- 
tinuous activity,  a  continuous  free  and  spiritual  activ- 
ity, of  self -communication  on  the  part  of  God — the 
unceasingly  creative  grace  of  God ;  a  self-communi- 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  REDEMPTION    2G7 

cation  and  creative  grace  of  which  nature  with  its 
orderly  uniformities  is  a  medium  or  form  or  method. 
Above  all — unless  we  are  to  be  atheists  in  our  very 
theism — we  must  think  of  God  in  creation  as  acting 
out  His  own  nature  and  in  that  sense  fulfilling  Himself. 
This  does  not  mean  that  God  exhausts  His  nature  in 
the  temporal  process  of  the  world  of  human  expe- 
rience; it  does  mean  that  God's  actions  proceed  from 
His  nature,  and  to  their  own  extent  express  that  nature. 
In  other  words,  we  must  not  think  of  some  central 
nature  in  God,  which  lies  inert,  while  His  creative 
activities  leap  forth  arbitrarily  from  some  source  other 
than  His  own  nature.  Sometimes  we  do  fall  into  that 
way  of  thinking;  and  in  doing  so,  miss  the  deepest 
and  most  vital  significance  of  the  theistic  view  of  the 
world.  We  think  of  God  as  the  external  creator  of 
the  world,  and  are  satisfied  with  that  because  it  meets 
our  polemic  need — enables  us  to  confute  the  sceptic  or 
the  materialist.  But  we  pay  the  penalty  in  views  of 
God  which  are  slight  and  poor,  instead  of  rich  and 
profound,  a  vital  and  all-transforming  light  of  life. 
We  are  so  intent  upon  refuting  the  opponents  of 
Christian  theism  that  we  fail  ourselves  to  work  out 
the  positive  significance  of  Christian  theism.  We  for- 
get that  in  thinking  of  the  world  as  God's  creation, 
we  must  think  of  God  as  acting  out  His  own  nature 
in  the  work  that  He  does ;  as  expressing  and  fulfilling 
Himself  in  the  creation  that  He  creates.  We  reduce 
God  in  our  thought  to  the  level  of  a  poor  artificer, 
working  upon  alien  materials  and  bringing  about  a 


268    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

result  to  which  His  own  nature  is  indifferent.  But 
when  we  remind  ourselves  that  God  cannot  be  indiffer- 
ent and  external  to  His  own  work ;  that  in  creation  He 
is  seeking  to  realise  an  end  worthy  of  Himself — 
worthy  of  Himself  in  the  deepest  sense  as  proceeding 
from  and  expressing  His  very  nature; — then  a  path- 
way of  light,  a  pathway  unspeakably  difficult  but  still 
a  pathway  of  light,  opens  up  through  this  gravest 
question  of  our  life.  The  successive  steps  in  it  we 
have  now  to  consider.^ 


First  of  all,  the  creation  in  which  God  can  thus  fulfil 
Himself  must  be  a  creation  of  free  and  spiritual 
beings,  able  to  grow  up  into  God's  likeness,  into  devo- 
tion to  His  will  and  purposes,  into  that  communion 
with  Him  in  which  heart  answers  to  heart  and  love 
to  love.  As  a  man  in  the  life  of  his  home,  if  one  may 
use  an  analogy  imperfect  but  significant,  truly  fulfils 
his  nature,  not  in  the  mere  walls  and  chairs  and  tables 
he  makes,  but  in  the  growing  human  and  spiritual 
perfection  of  his  sons  and  daughters;  so  God  truly 
fulfils  His  nature,  not  simply  in  masses  moving  in 
space,  not  in  the  development  of  animal  organisms 
simply  as  such,  but  in  the  gradual  reproduction  of  His 
spiritual  perfections  in  a  society  of  spiritual  beings; 
a  society  devoted,  alike  in  its  individual  hearts  and 

1  With  the  pages  that  follow  compare  Fairbairn,  Philosophy  of  the 
Christian  Religion,  pp.  132-168 — a  discussion  to  which  I  am  deeply  in- 
debted. 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  REDEMPTION    2G9 

in  its  righteous  order,  to  God  and  to  goodness.  But 
even  here,  in  justice  to  the  voiceless  things  about  us, 
we  should  remember  the  qualification  earlier  made. 
In  the  man's  home,  all  that  the  stone  and  the  wood 
are  capable  of,  any  dignity  of  austere  line  or  grace 
of  perfect  form  or  kindliness  of  rough  and  homely 
art — nay,  the  mere  brute  strength  of  walls  and 
floors — is  sanctified  by  the  life  to  which  it  conduces. 
And  that  not  externally ;  the  human  life  is,  in  a  sense, 
in  the  very  wood  and  stone;  it  has  in  them  a  medium 
of  its  realisation.  In  the  same  way,  but  more  deeply, 
for  here  all  is  organic  and  nothing  is  accidental  or 
external,  nature  has  its  great  place  in  the  life  of  the 
City  of  God ;  whether  we  think  of  the  long  natural 
history  in  which  we  have  our  birth  and  a  manifold 
determination  of  our  growth ;  or  of  the  magnificence 
of  intellectual  design,  through  our  many-sided  com- 
munion with  which  intelligence  is  developed  in  us ; 
or  of  the  solemn  beauty  which  is  our  strength,  and  in 
extremities  of  fate  when  we  have  done  our  best  and 
all  is  lost,  joins  itself  with  memory  to  be  our  con- 
solation. But  this  does  not  take  away  what  is  here  in 
question;  it  only  shows  us  how  vast  the  process  is. 
When  we  see  that  the  communion  of  God  with  His 
own  includes  the  whole  of  nature,  we  have  to  say,  as 
before,  that  it  is  only  in  a  society  of  free  spirits  who 
by  communication  of  Himself  become  like  Him,  that 
God  can  realise  the  purpose  which  expresses,  and  in 
that  sense  fulfils,  His  nature. 

But  from  such  a  view  of  the  relation  of  God  to  His 


270    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

own  creative  activity  a  consequence  follows.  The 
created  society  in  which  God  can  thus  fulfil  Himself, 
cannot  be  one  whose  members  have  a  perfection,  in 
the  upbuilding  and  maintaining  of  which  they  them- 
selves have  had  no  part.  However  splendid  the  appar- 
ent perfections  of  such  beings  might  be  imagined  to 
be — beings  so  good  that  their  goodness  has  no  source 
in  their  own  wills — such  perfection  would  be  no  per- 
fection of  individual  spirits  with  whom  God  could 
hold  communion,  in  that  deep  and  moral  sense  of  the 
word  communion  which  alone  is  appropriate  here. 
The  bearers  of  such  a  perfection,  passive  recipients 
of  it  from  without,  would  be  morally  nothing  better 
than  puppets  in  a  magnificent  but  shadowy  play ;  they 
would  be  modes  of  the  divine  substance  rather  than 
spirits  made  in  the  image  of  God — spirits  in  whom 
God  reproduces  Himself,  so  that  they  have  life  in 
themselves.  But  the  communion  of  God  can  only  be 
with  spirits  that  thus  have  life  in  themselves,  and 
can  reach  up  toward  the  divine  life,  spirit  answering 
through  the  struggle  of  ages  to  the  call  of  spirit,  men 
seeking  God,  and  God  imparting  Himself  to  man  in 
that  communication  which  is  not  only  the  blessedness 
of  the  creature,  but  must  be  also  some  part  of  the 
blessedness  of  the  Creator.  At  the  point  of  view  of 
an  account  of  human  nature  in  which  man  appears 
as  simply  a  mode  of  the  divine  substance,  even  Spinoza 
could  not  keep  himself.  In  the  existence  of  the  indi- 
vidual as  such  a  mode  he  saw  the  bondage  of  man ; 
and  sought  as  the  way  of  deliverance  some  means  of 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  REDEMPTION    271 

rising  above  that  existence  as  a  mode.  Still  less  can 
that  point  of  view  be  held  by  the  Christian  teacher, 
to  whom  religion  means  a  continuous  and  living  com- 
munion ;  the  living  soul  of  man,  through  enlarging 
days  and  with  gathering  freedom,  walking  with  the 
living  God. 

So  that  in  any  creation  in  which  God  acts  out  His 
own  nature,  and  in  that  sense  fulfils  Himself,  the 
created  beings  must  be,  actually  or  potentially,  free 
spirits.  Only  in  the  real  labours  and  genuine  im- 
pulses— it  may  be,  genuine  struggles  and  sufferings — 
of  such  spirits  can  that  divine  purpose  be  realised 
for  which  alone  creation  is  worth  undertaking.  If 
the  purpose  and  end  of  creation  be  the  blessedness 
of  communion  between  the  spirit  who  creates  and  the 
spirits  that  are  created,  then,  no  matter  how  inchoately 
or  under  what  form  of  potentiality,  the  Creator  must 
communicate  enough  of  Himself,  in  and  as  the  nature 
of  those  created  spirits  to  make  communion  possible. 
And  among  the  qualities  of  the  nature  of  God  thus 
communicated  to  us,  in  the  reproduction  of  Himself 
which  is  our  creation,  there  must  be,  in  the  measure 
of  the  limited  but  growing  soul  of  man,  the  fateful 
quality  of  freedom.  The  student  of  ethics,  and 
the  student  of  psychology,  find  reasons  to  believe  in 
human  freedom ;  reasons  derived  from  the  consider- 
ation of  that  self-organising  character  of  experience 
to  which  reference  was  made  in  the  second  lecture. 
The  theologian — the  exponent  of  the  religious  con- 
sciousness— accepting    those    reasons    of    the    ethical 


272    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

student  and  the  psychologist,  adds  to  them  this  still 
graver  one:  that  not  in  any  mechanical  order  (even 
though  the  mechanism  could  somehow  be  conscious 
and  in  that  sense  spiritual)  but  only  in  the  life  and 
the  affections  of  a  society  of  free  and  moral  beings, 
can  God  realise  an  end  which  is  a  worthy  expression 
and  fulfilment  of  Himself. 

But  consider  what  that  means.  It  means  that  the 
very  idea  and  fact  of  creation,  the  very  nature  and 
idea  of  the  divine  creation  of  the  spirit  of  man,  in- 
volves the  possibility  of  the  profoundest  of  all  trage- 
dies; involves  the  possibility  of  an  upward  or  a  down- 
ward way,  which,  when  realised  by  men  as  they  grad- 
ually enter  into  possession  of  themselves  and  make 
themselves  their  own  masters,  becomes  the  actuality 
of  obedience  or  disobedience,  sin  or  righteousness. 
Without  this  true  spiritual  dignity  of  freedom,  man 
could  not  be  the  object  of  God's  communion.  But 
what  is  always  and  inevitably  the  case,  is  here  pre- 
eminently the  case.  That  which  is  man's  dignity,  is 
also  his  danger ;  that  which  is  his  height  is  his  peril ; 
that  which  makes  man  capable  of  God  makes  him 
capable  also  of  his  fall.^ 

1  With  regard  to  freedom  it  was  possible  in  the  text  of  the  lectures 
to  refer  only  to  the  central  and  vital  theological  consideration;  the  con- 
sideration that  freedom  is  necessary  in  created  spirits  in  order  that  God 
may  in  them  be  able  to  secure  a  true  fulfilment  of  Himself  and  of  the 
purpose  in  which  He  expresses  Himself.  But  the  theologian's  belief  in 
an  all-organising  purpose  of  God  should  be  the  deepest  of  inspirations 
to  the  study  of  man's  empirical  life  and  historical  development.  The 
theologian,  as  a  theologian,  is  really  concerned  with  all  the  arguments 
and  points  of  view  that  have  come  forward  in  the  age-long  contention 
about  human  freedom;  whether  those  that  assert  a  necessity,  from  God's 
point  of  view,  for  or  against  a  freedom  of  man;   or  those  that  in  our 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  REDEMPTION    273 
B 

What  we  have  so  far,  then,  is  this :  if  mankind  is  to 
be  a  society,  or  part  of  a  society,  in  the  communion 
with  which  God  can  reaHse  Himself,  there  must  be, 
however  slowly  it  develop  itself,  a  genuine  freedom 
of  man;  and  thus  at  least  an  abstract  possibility  of 
good  and  evil.  Without  that  insight  there  is,  I  think, 
no  way  to  truth  or  to  light  upon  this  question.  But 
it  is  only  the  first  step;  the  cruel  and  bitter  centre  of 
the  problem  lies  still  before  us.  What  we  find  in  the 
experience  of  humanity  is  that  the  process  in  which 
men,  whether  as  individuals  or  as  a  race,  become 
originally  involved  in  sin,  is  not  at  all  a  process  in 
which  a  being  of  developed  mind  and  developed  will 

empirical  life  find  evidence  such  as  inclines  one  toward,  or  inclines  one 
away  from,  a  belief  in  freedom. 

The  argtiments  against  freedom  are  of  two  leading  types.  First,  there 
are  what  may  be  called  metaphysical  arguments.  These  are  based  in 
views  concerning  the  universal  relations  of  our  experience — views  con- 
cerning man's  place  in  the  total  system  of  reality;  the  Stoic  view,  for 
instance;  or  that  expressed  by  Spinoza  in  his  doctrine  of  the  bondage 
of  man.  Arguments  of  this  kind  fall  in  two  directions;  as  based  in 
views  of  the  relation  of  man's  experience  to  God  (Augustine,  for  in- 
stance, on  the  side  of  his  doctrine  which  has  been  historically  most  in- 
fluential) ;  and  as  based  in  views  of  man's  relation  to  nature  (natural- 
istic determinism  in  many  ancient  and  modern  forms — Professor  Hux- 
ley's suggestion,  for  instance,  that  man  may  perhaps  be  the  cunningest 
of  nature's  clocks). 

Secondly,  there  are  psychological  arguments;  arguments  based  in  that 
view  of  experience  which  arises  when  inquirers,  whether  Locke,  or  Hume, 
or  men  of  our  own  day,  assume  that  the  whole  psychological  reality  of 
experience  can  be  brought  to  light  by  a  purely  analytic  method;  the 
method  of  reaching  certain  simplest  constituent  elements  and  (explicitly 
or  implicitly)  treating  these  as  though  they  existed  in  their  own  right, 
and  by  their  own  nature  and  laws  determined  their  combinations  and 
successions,   which  are   our  experience. 

To  the  first  of  these  classes  of  arguments,  the  only  adequate  answer 
lies  in  some  more  penetrating  view  concerning  the  universal  relations 
of  our  experience.     The  view   of  nature,   for   instance,   stated   here,  in 


274    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

stands  in  a  clear  field  and  there  makes  in  clear  light 
his  choice  between  good  and  evil.  In  helplessness  we 
begin  our  life,  and  come  only  gradually  to  be  ourselves ; 
and  in  that  gradual  coming  to  be  ourselves,  long  before 
we  are  capable  of  clear  and  deliberate  volition,  we  are 
already  involved  in  the  sin  of  the  race.  We  acquire — 
nay,  long  before  we  were  born  there  were  prepared 
for  us — -passions,  instincts,  habits,  which  altogether 
naturally  and  altogether  easily  become  the  matter,  the 
body,  the  concrete  filling,  of  our  slowly  growing  will, 
and  as  thus  taken  up  into  our  will,  become  our  sin. 
What  we  were  naturally,  we  tend  to  become  delib- 
erately; and  thus  there  is  in  us  original  sin — the  sin 
which  comes  by  nature  in  the  sense  that  nature,  inno- 

general  terms  in  the  second  lecture  and  with  more  particularity  in  the 
third,  leads  to  a  theory  the  opposite  of  naturalistic  determinism;  while 
the  whole  view — a  very  ancient  one — of  God's  seeking  a  fulfilment  of 
Himself  in  the  devoted  goodness  of  man,  leaves  no  place  for  what  Cud- 
worth  called  "theological  fatalism."  To  the  arguments  of  the  second 
class — to-day  the  really  critical  and  dangerous  ones — the  answer  lies  in 
considering  the  true  character  of  our  experience  as  (both  in  its  aspect 
of  intelligence  and  in  its  aspect  of  practice)  self-organising  and  thus  self- 
determining.  That  consideration,  which  not  only  removes  psychological 
determinism  but  establishes,  or  rather  is,  a  constructive  doctrine  of  free- 
dom, was  touched  upon  here  in  the  second  lecture.  It  is  a  Kantian  les- 
son, though  Kant  was  not  the  first  to  teach  it,  and  may  be  found  worked 
out  in  many  modern  books;  see,  for  instance,  in  Green's  Prolegomena 
to  Ethics  the  discussion  of  the  freedom  of  man  as  intelligence,  §§  74-84, 
and  of  the  freedom  of  the  will,  §§  85-153. 

It  is  perhaps  advisable  to  add  a  sentence,  in  order  to  guard  against 
a  possible  misunderstanding.  We  have  seen  that  the  whole  order  of 
reality  is  present  totum  simul  to  the  divine  intuition.  And  the  whole 
order  of  reality  means  not  merely  a  section  cut  through  the  temporal 
course  of  the  world.  It  means  that  whole  temporal  course;  that  whole 
concrete  content  of  time,  which  is  nature  and  history.  But  then  it  is 
asked:  Does  not  this  altogether  preclude  freedom;  does  it  not  involve 
that  every  human  action  is  predestinated?  The  answer,  however,  is 
surely   plain.      Not   to   stop   here   upon   the   assumption   which   underlies 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  REDEMPTION    375 

cent  when  taken  abstractly  or  in  itself,  becomes  sin 
in  the  will  of  man.  It  is  most  true  that  in  this  there 
are  infinite  varieties  of  kind  and  degree.  It  is  most 
true  that  some  men  are  so  involved  in  the  evil  of  the 
world  that  it  is  only  by  a  convulsion,  a  radical  and 
catastrophic  spiritual  change,  that  they  enter  into  the 
Christian  life;  while  others  have  been  so  brought  up 
in  Christian  homes  that  they  have  never  felt  them- 
selves outside  of  the  church,  never  felt  themselves 
aliens  from  the  Kingdom  of  God,  but  have  entered 
upon  the  Christian  consciousness  as  morning  deepens 
into  day.  And  it  is  most  true  that  such  homes  are  at 
this  hour  the  deepest  need  of  the  Christian  church, 
and  of  the  general  society  of  mankind.    But  when  all 

such  an  objection,  the  assumption  that  God  must  be  ignorant  if  man  is 
to  be  free,  it  is  enough  to  point  out  that  the  objection,  taken  as  it 
stands  and  without  regard  to  its  underlying  assumptions,  radically  mis- 
apprehends the  whole  position  that  has  been  before  us.  It  is,  we  say, 
the  fundamental  faith  both  of  scientific  work  and  of  the  common  life 
that  reality  is  a  single  system;  a  faith  which  continually  is  being  vindi- 
cated. And  that  unity,  that  single  system,  is  not  abstract  but  con- 
crete; that  is,  it  takes  in  the  whole  of  nature  and  history,  the  whole 
content  of  the  world's  temporal  course.  But  that  drove  us  to  a  doc- 
trine, not  about  freedom,  but  about  time.  We  had  to  set  aside  what 
is  often,  and  very  uncritically,  taken  as  a  matter  of  course;  the  real- 
istic view  of  time.  The  fact  that  the  world  has  a  history  in  time  (is 
a  succession  of  events)  and  yet  is  a  single  universe,  we  had  to  account 
for  by  the  view  that  the  only  power  or  principle  that  can  make  possible 
such  a  thing  as  a  world  with  a  history  in  time,  which  yet  is  one  world 
and  not  a  series  of  disconnected  universes,  is  an  eternal  consciousness; 
a  consciousness  which,  knowing  perfectly  its  own  works,  has  the  whole 
course  and  content  of  time  present  to  it  in  a  single  intuition  (see  pp. 
120-124,  supra).  In  other  words,  the  true  account  of  time  is  not  the 
realistic  account  which  makes  time  a  sort  of  independent  container, 
holding  both  God  and  man  (which  is  to  make  time  itself  the  Absolute). 
Rather,  time  as  a  concrete  history  is  the  inner  organisation,  the  inner 
content,  of  eternity.  Eternity  is  time  taken  as  God  possesses  it;  that  is, 
as  a  whole.  To  say  that  God's  knowledge  of  the  world  is  an  eternal 
or  complete  intuition,  is  to  say  that  God  knows  reality  perfectly  where 


276    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

this  is  said,  the  fact  remains  that  by  nature  there  is 
that  in  us  which  we  must  overcome  in  an  overcoming 
so  radical  as  to  constitute  a  new  birth.  For  some 
men,  in  God's  strange  way,  the  tragedy  is  unspeak- 
ably profounder  and  more  appalling  than  for  others ; 
but  in  its  greater  or  lesser  measure  it  comes  upon 
us  all.  The  very  order  of  the  world  in  which  we 
enter  upon  our  moral  being  is  such  that  the  tendency 
to  sin  is  an  original  tendency  of  us  all.  And  not  a 
mere  abstract  tendency — that  were  no  serious  matter — 
but  a  tendency  confirmed  and  made  actual  in  habit 
and  instinct,  in  wild  passion  or  self-seeking  disposition, 
before  as  individuals  we  reach  moral  accountability 

we  men  know  it  only  imperfectly  and  progressively.  This  whole  view 
of  time  is,  in  fact,  a  special  side  of  what  is  expressed  in  the  general 
statement  that  God  is  the  Absolute  Spirit;  the  Absolute  Spirit,  not  in 
the  preposterous  sense  that  He  is  independent  of  the  relations  in  which 
the  existence  of  a  created  world  places  Him,  but  in  the  significant  and 
important  sense  that  He  is  the  source  of  His  own  relations;  is  the  self- 
determining  source  of  the  world,  and  knows  perfectly  the  world  which 
thus   He   constitutes. 

But  that  view  of  time  leaves  the  whole  question  of  freedom  open. 
Such  a  view  of  time  is  simply  the  altogether  unavoidable  doctrine  that 
to  God  time  is  a  single  whole;  else  God  is  not  God — the  content  of  time 
to  some  extent  escapes  Him.  But  the  question  about  freedom  is  the 
question  of  the  way  in  which  that  content  of  time  is  organised.  Are 
its  highest  laws  what  Kant  called  "laws  of  freedom" — laws  of  which 
the  agent  recognises  a  source  within  him,  and  which  he  lays  upon  him- 
self, so  that  morally  he  "has  life  in  himself"  and  is  to  himself  at  once 
lawgiver  and  judge;  or  are  they  what  Kant  called  "laws  of  nature" — 
laws,  that  is,  of  mechanical  action  as  distinct  from  the  spiritual  or 
teleological  action  which  leads  itself  on  by  conceptions  of  some  better 
state  of  affairs  which  is  to  be  as  the  result  of  the  action  itself;  leads 
itself  on,  as  we  commonly  say,  by  ideals?  To  answer  that  question, 
the  only  way  is  to  examine  the  evidence.  In  such  examination  of  the 
evidence,  the  key  to  the  whole  situation  lies  in  the  nature  of  man  him- 
self as  "practical  reason";  and  as  I  have  just  tried  to  point  out,  many 
types  of  inquiry  are  needed  if  the  investigation  is  even  to  begin  to  be 
adequate;  not  only  psychologry,  but  metaphysic  and  theology.  Into  that, 
however,  I  need  not  go  further;  the  one  point  here  at  issue  being  that 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  REDEMPTION    277 

at  all.  History  has  no  record  of  any  purely  human 
life  in  which  that  tendency  has  not  been  in  some 
measure  realised.  There  are  no  exceptions;  sin,  by 
nature's  way,  passes  upon  all  mankind. 

The  literature  of  religion  and  of  human  confes- 
sion— above  all,  the  New  Testament — is  full  of  the 
recognition  of  this  saddest  and  hardest  of  all  the 
facts  of  our  experience.  To  the  New  Testament,  man 
is  lost  in  sin ;  God's  way  with  man  is  essentially  a  way 
of  salvation.  Saint  Paul,  in  statements  that  are  cruel 
until  the  cruelty  of  his  universal  condemnation  passes 
over  into  magnificence  of  hope — Saint  Paul  shuts  up 
all  men  in  sin ;  he  views  mankind  as  one  in  sin,  as 

it  is  a  grave  misapprehension  to  suppose  that  if  there  is  an  all-inclusive 
divine  intuition  of  reality,  the  laws  of  the  events  present  in  it  must 
needs  be  laws  of  mechanical  necessity;  to  suppose,  in  other  words,  that 
the  completeness  of  the  divine  consciousness  of  the  world  involves  that 
the  world  is  unspiritual  and  undivine,  a  world  whose  members  have  no 
essential  life  in  themselves,  and  so  are  incapable  of  real  communion 
with  the  God  from  whom  they  come,  and  in  whom  they  live  and  move 
and  have  their  being. 

I  may  be  permitted  to  refer  here  to  another  matter  which  concerns 
not  only  the  question  of  freedom,  but  the  argument  and  form  of  expres- 
sion in  these  lectures  as  a  whole.  We  have  no  term  to  express  the 
relation  of  self-distinguishing  and  self-determining  spirits  to  one  an- 
other in  the  social  order  which  we  call  the  universe;  whether  the  rela- 
tion of  finite  spirits  to  one  another,  or  the  relation  between  them  and 
the  Absolute  Spirit.  In  lieu  of  such  a  term,  I  have  used  the  word 
organic-;  a  word  which  in  this  use  must  be  taken  as  conveying  a  sug- 
gestion rather  than  a  statement.  How  inadequate  to  the  relation  here 
in  question  that  word  would  be,  if  taken  strictly  in  its  biological  sense, 
has  often  and  rightly  been  pointed  out;  for  instance  by  Dr.  McTaggart 
(see  Studies  in  Hegelian  Cosmology,  specially  §  190  and  §  197).  I 
should  add,  however,  that  I  refer  to  this  essay  of  Dr.  McTaggart's  only 
for  its  bearing  upon  the  use  of  the  word  organic;  not  for  its  argument 
that  to  anyone  who  has  entertained  the  ideal  which  Hegel  defined — an 
absolute  and  ultimate  ideal — "society,  as  it  is,  or  as  it  can  be  made 
under  conditions  of  time  and  imperfection,  can  only  be  external  and 
mechanical"   (§  202)  ;  a  position  which  surely  is  extreme. 


278    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

having  a  solidarity  in  sin,  so  that  whatever  judgment, 
or  whatever  grace,  waits  upon  sin,  all  mankind  is 
gathered  together  under  it.  But  there  is  no  need  to 
cite  the  New  Testament  evidence  in  detail ;  it  is  enough 
that  the  Son  of  Man  knew  Himself  as  being  come  to 
seek  and  to  save  that  which  was  lost.  Let  me,  how- 
ever, in  connexion  with  that,  stop  for  a  moment  upon 
a  contrast,  old  but  perennially  instructive.  We  saw 
that  if  God  is  to  fulfil  Himself  in  a  life  of  communion 
with  His  children,  these  must  (however  gradually) 
be  made  free,  and  so  must  have  at  least  the  abstract 
possibility  of  good  and  evil.  But  what  we  have  just 
seen  is  that  with  such  an  abstract  possibility  we  cannot 
stop;  it  is  only  the  beginning,  not  the  end,  of  the 
matter.  There  is,  however,  a  type  of  thinking  which 
does  stop  at  that  point.  It  sees  a  man,  a  free  being 
over  against  God,  standing  in  a  reasonably  fair  and 
open  field,  and  making  in  that  field  his  choice;  so  that 
when  the  choice  is  once  made  and  settled,  man  has 
nothing  to  do  but  to  accept  the  final  and  absolutely 
correct  divine  judgment  upon  it.  Such  a  view,  when 
it  appears  as  plain  Deism,  we  all  repudiate;  giving 
due  tribute  of  admiration  to  the  sturdy  morality  which 
often  went  along  with  it,  but  pointing  out  that  it 
knows  virtually  nothing  of  the  great  New  Testament 
doctrines  of  sin  and  grace — in  other  words,  comes 
only  to  the  outer  edge  of  the  Christian  consciousness ; 
falls  thus  short  because  of  a  primary  defect  of  appre- 
hension, a  failure  to  know  the  heart  of  man  as  it  is, 
a  failure  to  grasp  the  actual  facts  of  man's  experience 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  REDEMPTION    279 

and  history.  The  trouble  is  that  the  view  which  we 
repudiate  often  comes  creeping  back  into  our  own 
theology.  To  take  what  is  virtually  a  Deistic  view  of 
God's  judgment  upon  our  sin,  and  then  to  turn  to  a 
legal  theory  of  atonement  as  a  way  of  escape  from 
the  hopeless  difficulties  thus  created,  is  perhaps  the 
hardest  to  guard  against  of  all  the  mistakes  to  which 
Christian  theologians  are  exposed. 

At  this  point,  however,  it  is  with  experience  as 
present  and  historical  fact  that  we  are  concerned;  it 
is  because  it  sets  actual  fact  of  experience  out  in 
clear  light  that  I  have  referred  in  this  connexion  to 
the  New  Testament.  Whatever  else  it  is  or  is  not, 
one  thing  the  New  Testament  prima  facie  is:  it  is 
(what  Deism  is  not)  a  profound  recognition  of  the 
actual  constitution  of  our  experience.  It  interprets 
us  men  to  ourselves ;  and  thereby  it  has  determined 
the  course  of  our  history  upon  the  earth.  But  let  me 
carry  this  one  step  farther.  Among  the  doctrinal 
commentaries  on  the  New  Testament  there  are  none 
like  experience  and  history;  there  have  in  fact  been 
few  deeper — or  sadder — obstacles  to  the  vivid  under- 
standing of  the  New  Testament,  than  the  habit  shown 
by  many  of  its  sincerest  believers,  of  falling  into  panic 
whenever  experience,  whenever  history,  whenever 
science,  draws  near.  We  have  already  had  to  notice 
a  scientific  opinion  for  which  there  is  much  evidence: 
that  the  long  natural  history  of  man,  before  man  was 
as  yet  a  self-judging  moral  spirit,  prepared  for  him 
a  fateful  inheritance;  an  inheritance  of  many-sided 


380    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

instinct  and  appetite,  absolutely  indispensable  to  a  life 
upon  the  earth — without  it  mankind  would  perish  in 
a  day — yet  the  material  of  fearful  moral  struggle, 
and  often  of  fearful  moral  loss.  But  not  to  dwell 
again  upon  that,  let  me  turn  to  a  second  chapter  of 
these  modern  studies.  Modern  historical  science,  as 
it  slowly  rolls  back  the  darkness  that  once  lay  over 
the  early  stages  of  the  growth  of  human  civilisation, 
deepens  with  every  successive  day  the  impression  that 
what  was  described  a  moment  ago  in  the  "small  let- 
ters" of  the  individual  life — the  involution  of  man  in 
evil,  before  he  has  come  to  anything  that  can  be  called 
developed  reason  and  developed  will,  so  that  the  devel- 
oping will  in  confirming,  as  to  some  extent  it  must, 
its  own  natural  content  and  disposition,  becomes  in 
greater  or  lesser  measure  a  sinful  will — has  taken 
place  also  in  the  "large  letters"  of  the  history  of  the 
race.  It  is  a  fearful  vision  opens  before  us,  as  the 
social  order  of  the  most  primitive  peoples  now  in 
existence  is  investigated;  and  as,  in  the  earlier  liter- 
ature and  customs  of  the  races  that  have  borne  the 
world's  highest  civilisations,  survivals  are  found  of 
a  similar  order  of  life.  Simply  to  say  that  it  is  an 
order  of  bestiality  is  to  miss  the  point.  It  is  something 
unspeakably  more  awful  than  mere  bestiality.  It  is  the 
state  of  mankind  which  has  been  described  by  saying 
that  its  members  have  the  reason  of  children,  but  the 
passions  of  grown  men.  Reason  has  dawned,  and  in 
its  dawn  has  broken  up  that  old  complete  control  of 
instinct  which  kept  the  animal  races,  each  in  its  own 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  REDEMPTION    281 

kind,  from  a  mere  chaos  of  natural  passion  and  from 
that  swift  self-destruction  of  the  race  which  in  such 
chaos  of  natural  passion  is  inevitable.  The  natural 
inhibitions  of  instinct  are  no  longer  a  final  power — 
they  no  longer  work  unfailingly  like  laws  of  nature; 
the  chaos  of  natural  passion  has  come;  or  rather,  it 
is  now  a  possibility,  and  the  possibility  would  be  real- 
ised were  it  not  that  the  new  principle — reason  or  self- 
consciousness — which  wrought  the  beginning  of  the 
ruin,  works  also  the  beginning  of  the  cure.  Human 
society  is  saved  from  self-destruction  by  that  first  of 
the  social  works  of  reason  known  to  the  student  of 
history;  the  arising  of  an  ironclad  body  of  custom 
which  saves  human  society  from  self-destruction,  by 
a  most  rigid  regulation  of  a  few  of  what  may  be  called 
the  natural  elements  of  social  life.  It  is  an  order  of 
life  which  has  risen  above  the  animal ;  but  has,  as  yet, 
nothing  of  the  achieved  glory  of  the  spiritual.  That 
is  why  a  modern  man,  with  the  spiritual  and  religious 
causes  of  human  civilisation  deep  in  his  heart,  revolts 
in  horror  from  it,  as  he  does  not  revolt  from  the 
merely  and  guiltlessly  animal ;  revolts  in  horror  from 
it  even  though  he  can  trace  the  social  necessities  in 
which  its  customs  arose ;  can  see  in  those  primitive 
marriage  customs  a  dawning  of  reason  as  a  power 
of  social  organisation ;  can  see  in  all  that  dark 
superstition — those  hideous  devices  to  meet  hideous 
fears — a  dawning  of  reason  as  a  religious  principle. 
Undeniably  it  was  a  step  upward ;  but  that  race 
bears    a    fearful    burden,    and    carries    forward    with 


283    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

it  a  fearful  inheritance,  which  in  its  upward  way  has 
to  be  led  through  such  stages.  The  hideousness  of 
those  manners  and  those  morals — what  an  abominable 
history  it  was  for  the  spirit  of  man  to  have  come  up 
through.  And  with  what  profound  power  it  must 
have  done  for  the  collective  race  of  man  what  now 
comes  perpetually  to  light  in  the  individual  life ; 
fastened  upon  the  human  soul,  in  that  sad  infancy, 
many  of  the  instincts  struggling  sub-consciously 
against  reason,  many  of  the  passions,  many  of  the 
habits,  that  now  we  wrestle  with  in  agony  as  our  sin. 
It  is  not  that  these  historical  studies  and  hypotheses 
give  us  a  complete  genetic  account  of  human  expe- 
rience and  of  the  sin  which  is  in  human  experience. 
The  deepest  root  of  sin  is  not  natural  passion ;  but 
another  and  a  profounder  power,  which  grows  in 
wantonness,  in  refinement,  in  cruelty,  as  civilisation 
grows.  The  deepest  root  of  sin  is  selfishness ;  and  our 
present  knowledge  of  the  natural  and  social  history  of 
man  does  not  constitute  an  adequate  empirical  account 
of  how  the  principle  of  selfishness  has  come  to  be 
bound  up  with,  and  involved  in,  the  very  character  of 
human  individuality ;  of  how  the  human  individual 
has  come  to  distinguish  his  own  good  from  the  common 
good  of  mankind,  and  thus  to  introduce  into  the  life 
of  mankind  the  root  and  principle  of  disorganisation, 
the  root  and  principle  which  issues  in  the  separation 
of  social  units  and  classes  from  one  another  and  from 
God.  But  those  studies  go  some  distance,  they  furnish 
some  steps,  in  such  a  genetic  and  empirical  account. 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  REDEMPTION    283 

And  even  at  the  risk  of  disturbing  the  proportion  of 
topics,  I  dwell  upon  those  contributions  of  natural 
and  anthropological  science  to  theology.  It  has 
been,  one  does  not  know  whether  to  say  our  great 
folly  or  our  great  misfortune,  to  regard  such  studies 
as  hostile  to  the  New  Testament.  But  so  far  from 
this  modern  scientific  faith  about  the  empirical  course 
of  man's  history,  and  the  ancient  New  Testament  faith 
about  the  universal  sinfulness  of  man — so  far  from 
these  being  hostile  faiths,  they  are  correlative  and  mu- 
tually supporting.  The  New  Testament  is  concerned 
with  the  result :  mankind  is  lost  in  sin — the  mission  of 
its  Lord  is  to  seek  and  to  save  that  which  was  lost.  That 
is  the  thing  which  for  religion  is  here  and  now  impor- 
tant. But  those  scientific  and  historical  inquiries— 
though  their  authors  intended  no  such  contribution- 
furnish  to  the  thoughtful  student  of  the  New  Testa- 
ment an  insight  into  some  of  the  empirical  factors  and 
forces  through  whose  working  that  result  has  come  to 
hold  true  for  every  adult  human  will.  The  light  is  little 
enough  indeed ;  but  in  this  desperate  problem  every 
gleam  of  light  is  to  be  welcomed.  In  any  case  we  must 
keep  clear  to  ourselves  that  the  three  great  points  of 
view  are  correlative  and  not  hostile:  that  of  science 
and  history,  dealing  empirically  with  the  genetic  pro- 
cess of  the  "making  of  man" ;  that  of  the  New  Testa- 
ment, concerned  immediately  and  practically  with  the 
result — a  race  lost  in  sin;  that  of  theology  and  phil- 
osophy inquiring  into  the  relation  of  all  this  long 
natural  and  social  process,  and  of  all  this  its  sad  result, 


284    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

to  the  nature  and  purpose  of  God — the  nature  and 
purpose  which,  we  must  beHeve,  animate  all  that  crea- 
tive activity  by  which  the  history  of  the  world  is  made 
possible. 

But  to  return  to  the  argument.  The  first  point  in 
it  was  that  without  a  freedom  of  man — and  hence  at 
least  the  abstract  possibility  of  sin — the  divine  purpose 
could  not  be  realised  in  man.  But  the  point  now  before 
us  is  that  God  imparts  our  freedom  to  us  in  such  a 
way — by  such  a  creative  method — that  by  the  time 
our  will  is  developed  it  already  is  involved  in  sin. 
And  that  is  the  bitter  and  critical  centre  of  the  whole 
problem.  "Could  not,"  we  ask  in  the  agony  of  our 
souls,  as  we  alternately  cling  to  and  shrink  away  from 
the  sin  which  is  ourselves,  the  evil  which  has  been  in 
the  history  of  the  race,  and  now  is  in  us  as  a  very  self 
of  ourselves — in  us  as  a  self  of  ourselves,  and  in  the 
world  as  a  principle  which  makes  whole  areas  of 
human  society  to  be  a  horror  of  suflfering,  a  horror 
of  uncleanness— "could  not  God  have  given  us  free- 
dom in  any  other  way  than  this  way,  which  seems  to 
defeat  the  very  gift  that  is  given?"  Granted  that  our 
life  must  have  a  centre  in  itself  if  it  is  to  be  truly  and 
deeply  a  life  of  communion  and  co-operation  with 
God ;  granted  that  we  must  in  a  certain  high  sense  be 
masters  of  ourselves  and  authors  of  our  own  fate,  if 
we  are  to  be  children  of  God ;  why  should  we  be  led  to 
such  possession  and  mastery  of  ourselves  through  a  his- 
tory which  so  taints  us  to  the  heart  that  to  all  eternity 
life  can  never  seem  quite  right  again ;  never  seem  again 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  REDEMPTION    285 

quite  clean  or  sweet  ?  Why  must  God's  communication 
of  Himself  as  the  soul  of  man  swing  down  through 
so  low  an  arc  of  nature  and  natural  passion?  Why 
must  the  conditions  of  our  life  be  such  that  mankind 
has  had  to  pass  through  the  revolting  moral  systems 
of  primitive  man;  and  why  such  that  each  individual 
man,  in  his  own  age  and  station,  must  make  his  way 
up  through  a  similar  process — involving  in  many  cases 
a  horror  of  moral  taint  unspeakably  worse  than  any 
inheritance  of  the  passions  of  primitive  man?  Would 
it  not  have  been  far  more  God-like,  if  God  in  commu- 
nicating Himself  and  making  possible  a  spiritual 
society  and  a  spiritual  history,  had  made  us  such  that, 
not  as  passive,  not  as  moral  puppets,  not  as  modes  of 
the  divine  substance,  but  as  free  spirits  answering  in 
the  energies  of  their  own  free  life  to  the  grace  of  God, 
we  could  have  maintained  unsullied  the  being  that 
God  gave,  and  unbroken  the  communion  with  Him 
that  He  intended  ?  As  it  is,  every  individual  man  now 
upon  the  earth  has  entered  into  the  tragedy  of  free 
will  before  he  has  attained  the  reality  of  free  will 
itself.  But  could  we  not  have  been  made  free  in  such 
a  way,  that  if  the  tragedy  of  freedom  came  upon  us, 
it  would  at  any  rate  come  only  after  we  had  entered 
into  the  reality  of  freedom,  and  by  our  own  choice 
brought  the  tragedy  upon  our  heads? 

He  is  a  hard  man  who  can  keep  his  mind  from  this 
cry  of  souls  that  loathe  the  evil  in  which  at  the  very 
dawn  of  their  moral  consciousness  they  find  them- 
selves entangled;  this  cry  of  souls  that  feel  the  life 


S86    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

they  have  from  God  to  have  undergone  before  they 
could  control  it  an  irremediable  disaster  and  ruin,  a 
taint  so  abhorrent  that  eternity  upon  eternity  of  pure 
and  high  achievement  would  not  wash  out  the  hateful 
stain.  Yet  the  theologian  can  scarcely  do  other  than 
insist  on  distinguishing  two  questions,  and  on  con- 
fining theology  chiefly  to  one  of  them.  The  one  ques- 
tion is :  Taking  the  order  and  the  history  of  our  life 
as  these  actually  are,  can  we  see  a  divine  idea  and  pur- 
pose in  them  ?  That  is  the  question  to  which  the  theo- 
logian must  in  the  main  keep  himself.  The  other  ques- 
tion is :  Granted  that  God  in  creation  is  realising  an 
idea  or  purpose,  why  did  He  not  take  some  better  and 
less  painful  way  of  realising  it?  If  He  would  give 
us  freedom,  why  must  He  develop  it  gradually  in  us 
in  such  a  way  that,  alike  as  individuals  and  as  a  race, 
we  are  entangled  in  evil  before  we  can  resist  it?  It 
is  not  fair  to  say,  indeed,  that  questions  of  this  second 
type  are  altogether  useless;  sometimes  the  putting  of 
them  leads  indirectly  or  by  suggestion  toward  light. 
But,  as  a  rule,  questions  concerning  what  might  have 
been  if  things  were  not  what  they  actually  are,  cannot 
usefully  take  a  leading  place.  What  the  theologian, 
the  student  of  philosophy,  the  man  of  science,  all  alike 
have  to  do  is  to  take  the  facts  of  experience  as  they 
are,  and  try  to  give  the  best  account  of  them  possible. 
And  for  the  theologian,  giving  the  best  possible  account 
of  facts  means  seeing  in  them  the  realisation  of  a 
divine  purpose  and  in  that  sense  a  self-fulfilment  of 
God.     It  may  be  there  are  created  beings,  free,  and 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  REDEMPTION    287 

yet  not  subject  in  our  way  to  moral  development. 
Mediaeval  theologians  thought  so,  and  attempted  to 
discuss  the  nature  of  such  beings ;  but  what  they  really 
discussed  under  that  head  was  a  nature  involved  in 
our  own  present  experience;  the  nature  of  the  pure 
or  absolute  reason  implied  in  the  development  of  rea- 
son in  us.  The  theologian  must  take  human  life  as  it 
is,  and  as  it  has  been  in  its  past  course  upon  the  earth ; 
and  taking  it  so,  he  must  penetrate  as  he  can  into  the 
relation  of  its  fundamental  order,  its  fundamental  con- 
stitution and  conditions,  to  God  and  to  the  creative 
activity  and  eternal  purpose  of  God. 

We  must  face  our  difficulty,  then,  as  it  stands.  God's 
purpose  in  the  creation  of  man,  so  we  must  continue 
to  say,  is  such  that  for  the  realisation  of  it  man  must 
be  made  free,  and  sin  and  righteousness,  therefore, 
both  possible.  But  the  way  in  which  God  actually  does 
communicate  to  man  the  capabilities  of  a  free  spirit 
is  such  that  the  scale  is  toppled  toward  sin;  for  it  is 
such  that  when  men  come  to  the  age  of  developed  will, 
they  are  already  involved  in  evil  in  this  deepest  of  all 
senses,  that  they  have  its  impulses  within  them  as  part 
of  their  own  nature ;  and  this  nature,  being  acted  out 
and  confirmed  in  will,  becomes  sin.  And  thus  the 
human  world  comes  to  stand  in  sin,  and  sin  is  in  it  as 
a  universal ;  that  is  to  say,  a  principle  of  the  whole 
historical  and  social  order  of  mankind,  so  that  there 
is  a  unity  and  solidarity  of  mankind  in  sin.  So  far  as 
can  be  gathered,  either  from  a  general  consideration 
of  the  order  of  our  life,  or  from  the  observation  of 


288    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

empirical  fact,  it  is  impossible  for  any  human  being  to 
come  to  adult  life — the  life  of  developed  intelligence 
and  will — untouched  with  sin.  And  that  not  merely 
in  the  sense  that  all  men  must  suffer  the  effects  of  the 
sin  that  is  in  the  world;  but  in  the  deeper  sense  that, 
with  whatever  variations  of  degree,  they  receive  sin 
as  a  principle  of  th'e  will. 

Appalling  as  this  difficulty  is,  there  is  one  refuge 
from  it  which  we  must  not  take.  We  must  not  view 
the  essential  order  of  our  life,  the  order  of  the  world 
in  which  we  enter  upon  our  moral  being,  as  from  God's 
point  of  view  indifferent  or  accidental.  To  do  that — 
to  leave  God  and  God's  plan  out  of  the  explanation  of 
the  essential  conditions  of  our  life,  the  essential  consti- 
tution of  our  world — is  that  worst  of  atheism,  the 
atheism  which  masks  itself  under  religious  names,  and 
seeks  to  honour  God  by  ascribing  the  mastery  of  the 
world  to  some  other  power.  Having  come  to  the  belief 
that  the  only  creation  worthy  of  God,  the  only  creation 
in  which  there  can  be  a  real  self-fulfilment  of  God,  is 
a  creation  of  beings  capable  of  coming,  soon  or  late, 
into  communion  with  Him  in  the  things  which  are  His 
moral  nature  and  thus  of  forming,  with  Him,  the  social 
order  of  a  divine  family;  and  having  seen  that  such 
a  creation  involves  the  giving  of  freedom  to  man ;  we 
must  now  further  believe  that  the  particular  way 
which  God  takes  of  communicating  to  man  his  being 
as  a  free  spirit — namely,  all  this  strange  history,  one 
side  of  which  is  that  natural  passions,  and  many  pro- 
cesses and  instincts  of  the  life  below  reason,  are  taken 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  REDEMPTION    289 

up  into  a  rational  soul,  and  in  that  soul  become  at  once 
the  basis  of  a  practical  life  and  an  infinite  moral  dan- 
ger— is  no  mere  accident,  no  mere  matter  of  an  indif- 
ferent divine  will,  arbitrarily  and  externally  creative, 
flinging  humanity  for  no  special  reason,  and  hence 
with  incredible  cruelty,  into  the  long  tragedy  of  its 
struggle  upon  the  earth.  Rather  there  must  be  some 
divine  necessity  in  it;  I  do  not  mean  any  mechanical 
necessity,  but  the  necessity  of  a  divinely  reasonable 
plan,  seeing  an  end  worthy  of  God  to  be  realised  and 
this  as  the  true  way  of  its  realisation;  the  necessity 
which  means  that  the  given  procedure — the  procedure 
which  we  human  beings  know  as  the  order  and  the 
tragedy  of  our  life — is  no  accident,  no  fatalism,  no 
arbitrarily  chosen  way,  but  on  the  contrary  is  rooted 
in  the  central  and  essential  deep  as  of  God's  wisdom 
so  of  His  love. 

From  that  there  is  for  the  Christian  theologian — 
nay,  surely,  for  any  thoughtful  man — no  escape. 
God's  strange  way  in  the  constituting  of  the  world 
and  in  the  making  of  man  cannot  be  accidental  to  God 
Himself.  It  must  have  in  it  some  necessity  of  divine 
reasonableness  and  divine  purpose.  And  when  from 
the  point  of  view  of  such  a  belief  we  look  upon  the 
world  of  our  experience,  there  dawn  upon  us  innu- 
merable particular  insights  which  do  not  "prove"  the 
belief,  indeed — it  cannot  be  proved — but  which  do 
exemplify  it  and  make  it  more  convincing.  These 
are  the  insights,  dwelt  upon  directly  or  indirectly  by 
Christian  writers  of  every  age,  into  the  disciplinary 


390    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

power  alike  of  physical  and  of  moral  suffering.  The 
soul  draws  its  larger  life  from  the  cruelties  of  nature, 
from  the  shadow  of  death,  from  the  grief  of  separa- 
tion between  souls  that  love  one  another,  from  tempta- 
tion and  the  vigil  against  it,  from  the  struggle,  never 
coming  upon  the  earth  to  final  victory,  against  gigantic 
powers  of  evil  that  seem  to  trample  down  the  world. 
But  there  is  more  than  that.  At  this  point  one  su- 
preme consideration,  central  to  Christian  thought 
from  its  commencement,  becomes  relevant;  relevant  in 
so  fundamental  a  sense,  that  any  discussion  of  the 
problem  now  before  us  which  does  not  culminate  in 
this  consideration  cannot  properly  be  called  a  discus- 
sion of  the  problem  at  all.  Before  turning  to  it,  however, 
I  must  point  out  that  one  further  step  is  possible  in 
the  statement  of  the  question  itself;  a  step  to  which 
many  a  soul  has  in  its  agony  been  driven.  God's  way 
of  constituting  the  world  cannot,  so  we  have  said,  be 
accidental  to  God  Himself ;  cannot  be  external  or  for- 
eign to  Him ;  so  that  the  world  must  have  in  God  a 
ground  of  necessity  for  being  constituted  the  way  it  is 
constituted.  But  for  many  a  man — for  many  a  Chris- 
tian man — the  trial  of  faith  is  too  hard.  The  way  in 
which  the  world  is  constituted ;  the  order  and  character 
of  its  history,  and  the  way  in  which  in  that  order  man- 
kind enters  upon  life ;  and  all  that  has  thus  come  to 
be ;  the  sin  that  is  a  very  part  of  ourselves ;  the  social 
order  filled  with  self -perpetuating  wrongs — oppressive 
and  treacherous  cruelties  of  the  strong  against  the 
weak,  unspeakable  degradations  made  inevitable  for 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  REDEMPTION    391 

many  of  the  poor;  all  that  state  of  mankind  summed 
up  in  Saint  Paul's  terrible  words,  all  the  revolt- 
ing history  which  lies  behind  that  state  of  humanity 
and  goes  we  know  not  how  far  in  making  it  possible ; — 
if  such  a  perilous  order  of  the  world  and  so  fearful  a 
realisation  of  all  its  perils,  was  involved  in  the  divine 
creation,  would  it  not  have  been  better  if  God  had  not 
created  at  all?  If  it  is  true  that  the  tragic  possibility 
of  good  or  evil,  obedience  or  disobedience,  sin  or  right- 
eousness, is  involved  in  the  very  nature  and  idea  of 
the  only  kind  of  creation  that  is  worthy  of  God ;  and 
if  it  is  further  true  that  the  possibility  of  sin  involved 
in  this,  was  to  be  no  mere  abstract  possibility,  but  one 
so  terribly  realised  in  the  life  of  the  earth  that  no  man 
born  into  that  life  could  escape  it;  then  is  creation 
really  worth  while?  Would  it  not  have  been  better, 
in  order  absolutely  to  prevent  sin,  for  God  not  to  have 
created  at  all? 

That  is  what  the  question  about  evil  comes  to,  when 
we  consider,  not  some  imaginary  situation,  but  the 
situation  in  which  we  human  beings  actually  are  in- 
volved, and  the  experience  which  is  actually  our  life. 
The  answer  to  it  must  be  the  answer  from  God's  point 
of  view ;  for  both  the  creating  itself,  and  the  adminis- 
tration of  the  sinful  created  world,  are  God's  action 
and  God's  responsibility — though  not  God's  respon- 
sibility in  a  sense  which  leaves  us  no  responsibility. 
It  may  be  objected  that  we  cannot  attain  to  answers 
from  God's  point  of  view.  With  the  reverence  toward 
God   and   with   the   sense   of   the   frailty   of   human 


292    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

thought,  impHed  in  such  an  objection,  every  sensible 
man  will  wish  to  associate  himself.  But  the  objection 
itself,  as  an  expression  of  Agnosticism — even  though 
it  be  the  implicit  Agnosticism  of  the  too  hasty  advo- 
cate of  God,  destroying  the  foundations  of  religion  in 
his  anxiety  to  vindicate  God  against  man — cannot  pass 
unchallenged.  Against  it  one  must  urge  that  in  ulti- 
mate analysis  the  true  answer  to  any  problem  whatso- 
ever, practical  or  theoretical,  is  an  answer  from  God's 
point  of  view.  The  human  mind,  in  virtue  of  its  origin, 
is  the  potentiality  of  such  answers;  toward  such  an- 
swers the  long  and  struggling  development  of  human 
insight  and  human  goodness,  whether  in  science  or 
morality  or  religion,  is  a  movement.  The  declaration 
that  the  divine  point  of  view  is  jnattainable  by  man 
involves,  for  instance,  the  declaration  that  the  right- 
eousness of  God  is  inaccessible  to  man  except  in  ways 
which  leave  man  no  longer  a  free  spirit  and  his  right- 
eousness therefore  of  no  value  to  God.  And  to  the 
question  now  before  us  the  answer  is,  in  one  sense, 
very  plain :  the  fact  that  God  actually  has  created, 
shows  that  from  the  divine  point  of  view  creation  is 
preferable  to  non-creation.  Yet  such  a  statement  is 
the  form  rather  than  the  matter  of  an  answer.  It 
gives  a  decision  without  showing  the  articulation  and 
inner  reason  of  it,  and  hence  serves  better  to  close 
a  discussion,  or  to  silence  an  opponent,  than  to  convey 
real  enlightenment.  Let  us  turn  rather  to  a  considera- 
tion which  has  in  it  no  such  logical  compulsion,  but, 
I   think,   very  real   enlightenment.     To  the  question 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  REDEMPTION    293 

whether,  when  the  creation  of  a  spiritual  society  in- 
volved such  an  appalling  natural  and  moral  history,  it 
would  not  have  been  better  if  God  had  not  created  at 
all,  there  rises  up  in  every  wholesome  man's  heart  an 
answer  as  soon  as  he  hears  the  question.  From  all 
that  is  deepest  and  best  in  himself,  he  swiftly  con- 
cludes to  the  attitude  of  God.  And  specially  from 
two  things.  First,  with  all  the  moral  handicap  under 
which  he  began  his  life,  and  with  all  the  tragic  possi- 
bilities of  good  and  evil  in  his  actions  and  decisions, 
he  still  would  choose  his  life  rather  than  non-exist- 
ence; he  recalcitrates  against  the  very  thought  of  the 
absolute  extinction  of  his  own  free  being.  And  the 
man  who,  in  that  deep  sense,  clings  to  life,  cannot 
consistently  give  his  voice  for  the  opinion  that  from 
any  point  of  view,  God's  or  man's,  nothingness  with 
the  absence  of  evil  would  have  been  better  that  crea- 
tion, with  evil  in  it  for  men  to  overcome;  not  petty 
evil  for  petty  wrestlers,  but  gigantic  and  appalling 
evil,  for  the  overcoming  of  which  and  in  the  over- 
coming of  which  men  must  become  like  God  Him- 
self and  rise  to  a  strength  like  God's  own  strength ; 
coming  to  be  the  heroic  and  conquering  sons  of  God, 
yet  kept  in  humility  because  to  overcome  evil  they  had 
first  to  overcome  themselves,  and  to  live  unto  God 
they  had  first  to  die  unto  themselves.  But  secondly, 
if  to  that  man  the  power  were  somehow  given,  guilt- 
lessly to  save  the  infant  children  in  his  home,  by  an 
instant  and  final  annihilation  of  their  being,  from 
the  terrible  possibilities  of  good  and  evil,  of   right- 


294    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

eousness  and  sin,  that  wait  upon  them  as  the  hidden 
energies  and  passions  of  their  nature  unfold,  his  deci- 
sion would  be  the  most  swiftly  made  of  all  human 
decisions.  For  his  children  who  are  guiltless  now, 
but  can  by  no  possibility  remain  guiltless  if  they  go 
forward  into  the  years,  he  would  choose  life. 

So  far,  then,  there  is  some  light  upon  this  last  and 
most  terrible  of  the  problems  of  our  experience.  I 
do  not  mean  to  exaggerate  the  extent  of  that  light. 
No  man  can  look  upon  the  brutalities  and  cruelties 
of  this  world,  upon  the  deep  injustice  of  our  social 
and  industrial  order,  upon  individuals  and  classes  that 
are  ghastly  wrecks  of  humanity,  upon  the  established 
ways  of  strong  men  to  wealth  and  power,  of  which 
such  wrecking  of  humanity  is  the  inevitable  out- 
come— no  man  can  look  upon  these  without  feeling 
himself  well-nigh  driven  to  silence.  But  the  theolo- 
gian always  must  remember  that  theology  is  the  intel- 
lectual interpretation  of  religion :  and  what  religion 
means  is  precisely  this,  that  men  have  faced  the  things 
which  seem  fitted  to  drive  them  to  despair,  and  in  the 
presence  of  those  things  they  have  not  despaired,  have 
not  doubted  of  God,  have  not  been  driven  to  that 
silence  which  is  the  only  serious  one,  the  silence  of 
heart  and  of  hope.  To  be  religious  at  all  means  to 
hold,  whether  with  clear  consciousness  or  no,  to  the 
faith  that  in  all  His  works  God  is  both  supreme  and 
good;  and  in  the  power  of  that  faith  to  rise  above 
practical  hopelessness.  And  when  religious  men  would 
hastily  condemn  us  to  intellectual  or  scientific  hope- 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  REDEMPTION    295 

lessness,  one  can  only  urge  what  already  has  been 
urged ;  that  if  a  thing  is  practically  true,  is  the  supreme 
and  inspiring  truth  of  the  practical  life  (as  religious 
faith  is  to  religious  men),  it  cannot  be  scientifically 
false;  and  that  the  theologian  who  asserts  such  hope- 
lessness, and  then  proceeds  to  doctrines  of  grace  and 
salvation,  contradicts  himself  formally  as  well  as 
really. 

C 

Two  steps  of  the  discussion  are  now  before  us.  In 
the  first  we  saw  that  any  creation  in  which  God  can 
fulfil  Himself  must  be  in  its  ultimate  outcome — must 
be  late  or  soon,  however  gradual  the  creative  pro- 
cess— a  creation  of  free  spirits.  In  the  second  we 
turned  to  the  actual  process  in  which  God  is  commu- 
nicating such  free  being  to  the  soul  of  man,  and  found 
ourselves  in  presence  of  a  remarkable — nay,  an  appall- 
ing— natural  and  moral  history  whose  course  and  order 
are  such  that  man  enters  upon  his  life  of  moral  ac- 
countability already  involved  in  sin.  Standing  face  to 
face  with  that,  we  found  that  we  had  no  choice  but 
to  regard  creation,  terrible  as  its  facts  are,  as  never- 
theless God's  creation,  and  as  from  God's  own  point 
of  view  preferable  to  non-creation. 

But  those  two  steps  lead  us  to  a  third  step.  They 
cast  some  light  upon  the  question  why,  in  a  world 
created  by  a  God  who  is  altogether  goodness,  sin  should 
be  not  merely  a  possibility,  but  a  thing  apparently  made 
inevitable,  as  a  quality  of  the  individual  will,  by  the 


296    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

very  order  of  the  life  into  which  individual  men  are 
born — the  very  way  in  which  the  individual  will  comes 
to  be  an  individual  will.  But  however  much  or  however 
little  light  they  bring,  they  form  the  beginning  rather 
than  the  end  of  the  discussion.  For  if  creation  in- 
volves such  tragic  possibilities,  and  these  are  only  too 
terribly  realised ;  while,  at  the  same  time,  to  God  crea- 
tion is  preferable  to  non-creation;  then — as  we  may 
say  in  our  human  way  of  putting  it,  in  which  we  bring 
forward  one  by  one  factors  that  to  God  are  present 
eternally,  present  totum  simid — creation  itself  sets  a 
problem  for  God ;  or  rather,  God  in  creating  sets  a 
further  problem  for  Himself.  Consider  the  situation. 
To  God  creation  is  preferable  to  non-creation ;  speak- 
ing not  from  any  mechanical  point  of  view,  but  from 
the  point  of  view  of  the  demands  of  God's  own  nature, 
creation  must  take  place.  Yet  it  involves  for  the 
created  not  merely  the  alternative  between  righteous- 
ness and  sin,  but  that  alternative  in  such  a  form  that 
for  man  at  the  beginning  of  his  life  the  chances  are 
against  him ;  alike  in  the  individual  and  the  race,  his 
will  takes  on  its  habits  and  tendencies  long  before  there 
can  be  any  union  in  him  of  developed  will  with  the 
developed  intelligence  that  has  clear  vision  of  the  mean- 
ing of  life  and  of  its  choices.  And  the  result  only  the 
long  ages  of  human  sorrow  and  human  repentance  can 
interpret ;  only  the  degradation  and  the  mortal  agony 
of  all  this  world.  But  if  that  be  the  situation,  is  that 
situation  God's  last  word?  Must  there  not  be  some- 
thing more  than  all  that  in  the  order  of  the  world — 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  REDEMPTION    297 

the  order  of  natural  and  historical  conditions — which 
God  institutes  and  in  which  we  men  live  our  life  and 
work  out  its  issues?  Surely  there  can  be  but  one  con- 
clusion. The  world  is  God's  world;  we  are  His  chil- 
dren; the  whole  existence  and  growth  of  our  expe- 
rience, including  all  our  power  of  asserting  ourselves 
in  good  and  in  evil,  is  possible  at  all  only  through  His 
communication  of  Himself.  So  that  the  sinful  asser- 
tion of  the  will  of  man,  while  it  is  a  fact,  is  not  the 
whole  of  the  fact.  It  takes  place  in  a  divinely  consti- 
tuted order,  whose  God  we  cannot  think  of  either  as 
an  absent,  or  as  a  defeated,  God.  He  did  not  make 
His  world  to  cast  it  away,  an  irremediably  tainted  thing. 
He  did  not  give  life  to  His  innumerable  children,  only 
in  order  that  they  might  be  led  to  defeat  the  purpose 
which  He  had  in  their  creation.  Sin,  then,  cannot  be 
the  ultimate  word  of  His  creative  work  ;  neither  nature 
nor  freedom  nor  sin  can  be  that  ultimate  word.  In 
God's  relation  to  His  world,  and  in  His  administration 
of  it,  there  must  be  something  else ;  and  that  something 
else  must  be,  in  the  experience  and  history  of  mankind, 
the  central  and  essential  thing,  only  in  relation  to  which 
can  either  nature  or  freedom  or  sin — or  anything  that 
is  in  man's  life — be  seen  in  its  true  meaning.  We  are 
driven  to  look  for  a  process  of  the  overcoming  of  sin ; 
a  process  instituted  divinely  and  eternally,  and  placed 
in  the  order  of  human  history  as  that  central  thing  by 
reference  to  which  every  constituent  factor  and  element 
in  human  experience  has  its  genuine  significance,  and 
apart  from  which  all  things  human  are  but  shadows 


298    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

of  themselves,  if  not  shadows  that  mislead.  If  the  pos- 
sibility of  sin  is  involved  in  the  very  bringing  into  exist- 
ence of  any  such  thing  as  a  genuinely  spiritual  society ; 
and  if  among  the  created  beings  there  is  a  race,  such 
as  that  of  man,  in  which  the  possibility  is  only  too 
sadly  and  only  too  certainly  realised,  so  that  sin  passes 
on  like  a  natural  inheritance  from  generation  to  genera- 
tion and  thus  is  original  to  the  race : — then  what  we 
must  look  for  from  the  goodness,  from  the  justice  and 
grace,  of  God,  is  surely  clear.  The  God  who  upon  His 
own  initiative  gave  to  those  spirits  their  perilous  being, 
and  who,  moreover,  is  the  creative  and  constitutive 
source  of  that  whole  order  of  the  universe  in  which 
they  work  out  their  fate,  will  make  that  whole  order 
of  the  universe  in  its  very  essence  an  order  of  redemp- 
tion ;  an  order  whose  fundamental  forces  are  directed 
against  sin  for  its  overcoming.  But  in  a  free  spirit 
the  overcoming  of  sin  cannot  be  brought  about  by 
forces  that  act  mechanically  or  eternally ;  a  being  gov- 
erned by  such  forces  is,  like  one  of  Spinoza's  modes, 
capable  neither  of  sinning  nor  of  being  saved  from 
sin.  The  overcoming  of  sin  can  take  place  only 
through  the  winning  of  the  loyalties  and  devotions  of 
the  sinful  heart  to  that  which  is  the  opposite  of  sin; 
to  God  and  righteousness,  to  love  and  truth.  So  that 
what  we  must  believe  about  the  heart  of  things — about 
the  real  order  and  constitution  of  the  world,  the  real 
order  and  constitution  of  the  nature  and  the  history 
in  which  we  have  our  life — is  that  it  is  on  its  negative 
side  an  order  directed  to  the  overcoming  of  evil ;  on 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  REDEMPTION    299 

its  positive  side  an  order  constituted  for  the  winning 
of  human  hearts,  through  fihal  love,  into  the  Hkeness 
of  God.  In  a  word,  what  we  must  beHeve  is  what  the 
New  Testament,  in  many  different  ways  and  from 
many  different  points  of  view,  continually  impresses 
upon  us  as  the  reality  of  the  order  and  the  history  in 
which  we  have  our  life :  not  so  much  a  desperate  quest 
on  man's  part  after  God — though  that,  too,  would  have 
its  truth — but  rather  God's  seeking  of  man.  And  in 
all  this — all  this  sin  of  man,  all  this  salvation  of  man — 
man  is  both  the  individual  and  the  race;  the  race,  and 
in  the  race  the  individual ;  the  individual,  and  through 
the  individual  the  race.  For  no  man's  salvation,  in 
this  world  or  in  any  other,  is  made  perfect,  until  the 
social  order  in  which  he  has  his  being  is  an  order  of 
righteousness ;  an  order  in  which  none  is  wronged, 
none  is  oppressed,  none  is  made  a  mere  means  to  an- 
other's ends,  none  has  the  ways  of  spiritual  growth 
closed  against  him ;  but  all  men  serve  the  good  of  all, 
so  that  any  success  to  any  man  means  an  increase  of 
life  and  of  the  goodness  of  life  to  all. 

We  should  mark  a  further  consequence  of  this  view 
of  reality  as  in  its  ultimate  truth  a  process  of  redemp- 
tion, a  process  in  which  God  seeks  to  save  men  by  win- 
ning their  hearts  back  to  Himself.  It  was  said  a  mo- 
ment ago  that  freedom — the  freedom  in  which  we 
sinned  and  in  which  nature  in  us  became  sin — could 
not  be  the  last  word.  Yet  in  the  redemption  which  is 
the  last  word,  freedom  is  not  destroyed.  God's  win- 
ning of  the  hearts  of  men  back  to  Himself  from  their 


300    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

sin,  means  that  they  enter  upon  a  higher  freedom,  the 
freedom  of  unity  with  God.  In  that  higher  freedom, 
positively  they  take  the  will  of  God  as  their  own  will, 
and  act  it  out  from  their  own  free  centres  of  life. 
Negatively — if  indeed  the  distinction  between  positive 
and  negative  is  not  here  inappropriate — they  do  what 
is  in  them  to  overcome  and  undo  the  evil  of  the  world ; 
the  evil  they  themselves  wrought  deliberately  or 
thoughtlessly,  in  their  own  earlier  and  perverse  free- 
dom ;  the  evil  that,  like  a  part  of  the  system  of  nature, 
hands  itself  on  from  generation  to  generation,  acting  as 
a  universal  or  social  power  and  involving  individual 
men  in  it  before  either  their  intelligence  or  their  will 
is  sufficiently  developed  to  enable  them  to  make  ade- 
quate resistance.  So  that  the  freedom  which  means 
a  unity  of  man  with  God,  means  that  man  becomes  a 
sharer — an  agent — in  God's  work  of  redemption ;  the 
work  in  which  evil  is  overcome  not  by  negation,  not  by 
annihilation  of  the  sinful  soul,  still  less  by  a  merely 
legal  forgiveness,  but  by  winning  that  soul  to  love 
and  devotion  toward  God  and  toward  good.  The  prin- 
ciple of  freedom,  the  principle  of  redemption,  the  prin- 
ciple of  religion,  are  one  and  the  same  thing;  the  love 
of  God,  and  in  that  love  the  unity  of  the  will  and  the 
work  of  man  with  the  will  and  the  work  of  God.^ 

1  The  whole  of  Hegel's  immense  and  overbearing,  yet  profoundly 
valuable  philosophy — the  whole  of  his  idealistic  interpretation  of  nature 
and  history — might  with  some  justice  be  called  a  single  elaborate  expo- 
sition of  this  idea  of  freedom  as  that  in  which  man  (the  individual  and 
the  race)  becomes  truly  himself  by  making  himself  at  one  with  God. 

The  idea  that  the  truly  devoted  man  becomes  a  sharer  or  agent  in 
God's  redemptive  work,  which  I  have  mentioned  here  only  in  connexion 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  REDEMPTION    301 

It  is  only  putting  what  we  have  just  seen  into  other 
words  to  say  that  just  as  we  are  driven  to  it,  when  we 
attempt  to  consider,  from  God's  side,  the  problem  of 
our  life,  so  are  we  driven  to  it  from  our  own  side; 
for  the  relation  of  God  to  man's  life,  and  of  man's 
life  to  God,  is  one  and  the  same  relation  from  which- 
ever side  we  attempt  to  trace  it.  Yet  let  us  give  a 
moment  to  the  latter  way  of  taking  it.  Consider  once 
more  the  course  in  which,  before  we  know  it,  we  are  all 
of  us  entangled  in  the  ways  of  sin.  Consider  how 
man,  the  individual  or  the  race,  while  he  is  still  a 
helpless  child  and  before  his  day  of  clear  and  distinct 
volition  has  come,  is  already  involved  in  evil  habits ; 
and  with  what  terrible  ease  and  certainty  these  become 
the  content  of  his  developing  will.  And  consider  that 
the  order  of  the  world  in  which  this  is  possible,  God 
created  and  not  we.  Does  not  this  unspeakable  tragedy 
of  man,  in  a  world  whose  order  God  constituted,  give 
man  a  claim  upon  God ;  a  claim  that  God  should  seek 
and  should  lift  up  the  child,  not  merely  fallen,  but 
thus  fallen?  The  question  may  sound  bold.  But,  as 
was  indicated  a  moment  ago,  bold  though  such  a  ques- 
tion is,  there  is  one  great  book  of  religion  which  from 

with  the  question  of  freedom,  deserves  on  its  own  merits  and  for  its 
own  sake  a  primary  place  in  the  teaching  of  the  church.  It  is  a  fun- 
damental idea  alike  of  the  New  Testament  and  of  the  Christian  con- 
sciousness; but  has  been  greatly  neglected.  There  is  a  very  telling  state- 
ment of  it  in  the  closing  section  (pp.  199-219)  of  Professor  Lyman's 
Theology  and  Human  Problems.  Compare,  also.  Professor  William 
Newton  Clarke's  account  of  the  "sin-bearing"  of  God  and  of  Christian 
men  (^Outline  of  Christian  Theology,  pp.  341-360);  and  a  remarkable 
passage  in  Professor  Royce's  The  World  and  the  Individual,  Second 
Series,   pp.   390-392. 


302    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

beginning  to  end  is  a  recognition  of  it,  and  in  that  sense 
may  be  said  to  welcome  it.  As  it  has  been  the  busi- 
ness of  Christian  preaching  from  the  first  days  of  the 
church  to  declare,  the  New  Testament  is  not  so  much 
the  book  of  man's  seeking  God,  as  of  God's  seeking 
man.  It  is  the  book  of  God's  love  and  God's  grace; 
the  book  of  the  mission  which  our  Lord  had  from  the 
Father  to  seek  and  to  save  that  which  was  lost.  We 
do  not  depart  from  the  New  Testament  point  of  view 
when,  even  in  the  very  shame  and  agony  of  our  sense 
of  sin,  we  let  our  natural  sense  of  justice  have  its  way, 
and  insist  not  only  upon  our  own  responsibility  but 
also  upon  the  responsibility  of  God.  God's  relation  to 
man  and  man's  relation  to  God  is  a  case  of  father- 
hood and  sonship,  where  the  father  is  the  absolute 
source  of  the  child's  soul ;  where  the  father  is  the 
absolute  source  of  the  system  and  constitution  of 
things  in  which  the  child's  soul  has  its  gradual  en- 
trance upon  its  being  and  upon  the  exercises  and  activi- 
ties of  that  being;  and  where  the  father  has  all  power. 
All  power : — with  one  fundamental  limitation  which  is 
implied  in  the  very  nature  of  God's  creative  activity, 
and  is  the  true  key  to  the  present  problem;  a  limita- 
tion, we  should  mark,  which  is  not  external  to  God, 
because  God  is  Himself  the  source  of  it.  In  deter- 
mining Himself  to  create.  He  determines  Himself  to 
this  limitation ;  so  that  even  in  thus  limiting  Himself 
He  is  truly  infinite — truly  infinite  as  opposed  to  that 
false  or  empty  infinity  and  omnipotence  which  ab- 
stractly can  do  anything  whatever  because  concretely 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  REDEMPTION    303 

and  actually  it  does  nothing  in  particular.  That  limi- 
tation is  that  God  must  not  (or  "will  not" — in  this 
connexion  the  two  words  mean  one  and  the  same 
thing)  do  anything,  even  in  order  to  save  His  child, 
which  decisively  takes  away  His  child's  freedom,  and 
so  makes  that  child  a  mere  "thing"  or  "mode"  endur- 
ing a  fate  which  he  himself  has  not  worked  out.  And 
the  reason  why  we  cannot  think  of  God  as  decisively 
taking  away  His  child's  freedom,  even  to  save  him 
from  committing  sin,  is  that  in  so  doing  God  would 
defeat  His  own  purpose  in  creation ;  the  purpose  of 
giving  being  to  a  society  with  whose  members  He  can 
have  real  communion — ^communion  of  thought  with 
thought,  of  heart  with  heart,  of  love  with  love,  of 
purpose  with  purpose. 

We  must  think,  then,  of  the  real  order  of  the  world, 
the  order  in  which  our  common  life  has  its  meaning, 
as  an  order  of  disciplinary  and  redemptive  grace ;  a 
social  order  which  is  an  order  of  salvation;  a  process 
in  which,  by  the  discipline,  by  the  generosities,  by  the 
affections,  of  a  dispensation  of  grace,  God  wins  the 
hearts  of  His  children  to  Himself ;  reconciles  them  to 
Himself — reconciles  the  world  and  all  things  to  Him- 
self— and  so  is  establishing  that  City  of  God  for  whose 
dear  sake  creation,  with  all  that  creation  involves,  was 
undertaken,  and  nature  in  all  her  processes  instituted. 
This  we  must  think,  even  though  among  those  pro- 
cesses of  nature,  along  with  the  heavenly  beauty  that 
lifts  up  the  heart  of  man,  and  along  with  the  soul  of 
magnificent  reason  that  exercises  and  develops  reason 


304    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

in  man,  there  go  also  the  tragic  passions  that  have  pre- 
pared for  themselves,  apparently  through  long  ages  of 
developing  mind  and  life,  a  seat  in  the  divided  heart 
of  man,  so  that  in  that  heart  God  and  nature  seem  at 
war.  When  we  face  the  last  sad  mystery  of  our  life, 
and  when  in  facing  it  we  remember  that  it  is  a  mystery 
which  does  not  and  cannot  exist  independently  of  God, 
but  on  the  contrary  has  its  being  within  a  divinely  con- 
stituted and  divinely  administered  world,  we  must 
believe  that  the  love  which  created  does  but  love  the 
more  deeply  when  the  created  beings  realise  the  tragedy 
possible  in  their  creation;  loves,  and  in  loving  saves; 
but  just  because  it  loves,  will  not  save  by  any  method 
that  breaks  down  the  freedom,  the  true  spiritual  indi- 
viduality, in  that  sense  the  independence,  of  the  soul 
that  is  to  be  saved.  The  will  of  man,  evil  by  tragic 
succession  of  nature,  sinful  by  deliberate  self-seeking, 
is  overcome,  not  by  annihilating  it,  but  by  winning  it 
to  its  true  allegiance ;  winning  it  to  the  surrender  which 
is  no  mere  negation  of  life  and  will,  but  means  finding 
in  the  love  of  God  the  supreme  and  all-inclusive  im- 
pulse of  a  most  practical  life.  It  is  only  so,  that  sin  can 
be  overcome  in  a  truly  spiritual  order  in  which  all  souls 
are  of  eternal  value  to  the  God  who  by  an  imparta- 
tion  of  Himself  gave  them  being.  To  the  man  who 
thus  has  given  to  God  the  love  of  his  heart,  and  taken 
the  will  of  God  as  his  own  will,  nature  and  her  laws 
stand  fast;  and  yet  all  things  have  become  new.  The 
grace  of  God  which  thus,  in  the  secret  places  of  man's 
heart,  in  the  visible  institutions  of  his  society,  in  the 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  REDEMPTION    305 

sacramental  ministrations  of  little  children,  in  the  dis- 
cipline, the  consolation,  the  solemn  beauty,  of  the  nat- 
ural world,  perpetually  is  at  work,  drawing  by  tender- 
ness and  by  severity  his  heart  to  the  heart  of  God ;  and 
the  order  of  redemption  which  by  this  grace  is  con- 
stituted : — these  are  the  true  inwardness  of  the  natural 
order,  and  the  temporal  history,  and  all  that  constitu- 
tion of  things,  in  which  man  has  his  being,  lives  his 
life,  works  his  work,  sins  his  sin. 

It  has  been  my  task — it  is  every  thoughtful  man's 
task — to  consider  the  outlook  of  the  Christian  con- 
sciousness upon  the  fundamental  or  eternal  order  of 
our  life,  and  to  bring  that  outlook  into  connexion  with 
our  rational  consciousness  of  the  world,  in  the  en- 
deavour to  gain  some  glimpse  or  suggestion  of  the  unity 
which  is  at  once  the  presupposition  and  the  desired 
goal  of  all  intelligence  and  of  every  religious  heart; 
the  spiritual  unity  of  the  real  world,  and  of  the  soul 
of  man  in  and  with  that  world.  We  began  with  the 
strange  and  mingled  scene  which  is  our  life  and  com- 
mon experience  upon  the  earth :  all  this  daily  labour 
in  which  our  bread  is  gained ;  all  this  intercourse  of 
quiet  eyes  and  thoughtful  minds  with  nature ;  all  this 
growth  of  science  and  art;  all  these  struggles  and 
achievements  of  the  moral  soul  of  man,  called  to  good, 
solicited  by  evil ;  all  this  shaping  of  life  into  social  and 
political  organisation,  in  institutions,  in  civilisations; 
all  the  turning  of  the  heart  of  man  in  repentance,  in 
transforming  faith  and  love,  toward  some  greater  heart 


306    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

of  love  eternal  in  the  changes  of  time.  With  these 
things,  and  with  the  long  history  of  humanity  in  these 
things,  and  with  that  remarkable  and  startling  history 
which  preceded  upon  the  earth  the  history  of  humanity 
in  these  things,  we  had  to  begin.  Putting  ourselves 
at  the  point  of  view  of  the  rational  consciousness,  we 
tried  to  make  clear  to  ourselves  how  such  things  could 
be;  tried  to  put  them  all  together  in  one  intelligible 
order  in  the  view  of  which  reason  could  find  rest. 
And  what  we  have  finally  been  brought  to,  is,  I  will 
not  say  a  belief  to  which  the  religious  consciousness 
also  comes,  but  the  belief  in  which  it  has  its  very 
being.  The  reality  of  the  world  of  our  human  expe- 
rience ;  the  reality,  that  is  to  say,  of  all  this  infinite 
length  and  complexity  of  the  physical  and  natural  his- 
tories in  whose  wonders  of  sheer  beauty  and  sheer 
reason,  considered  simply  for  themselves,  God  may 
indeed  have  a  creative  joy,  but  whose  story  we  do  not 
fully  tell  until  we  say  that  they  come  at  last  to  con- 
sciousness in  the  freedom  and  the  moral  struggle  which 
are  our  human  life;  and  the  reality  of  that  moral 
struggle  itself  and  of  the  divine  communication  of 
freedom  which  renders  it  possible ;— the  reality  of  all 
this  is  the  grace  of  God;  the  grace  of  God  animating 
a  history  in  which  by  strange  and  deep  and  stern  pro- 
cesses of  the  failure  of  man  and  of  his  rising  again, 
there  is  brought  into  being  a  society  whose  members 
can  have  with  God  a  communion  in  the  things  that  are 
His  own  nature — righteousness  and  reason  and  love. 
In  the  grace  of  God  the  whole  order  and  process  of 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  REDEMPTION    307 

the  world  is  a  process  and  order  of  redemption ;  a 
bringing  of  man  from  sin  to  his  divinely  intended 
unity  with  God,  with  nature,  with  himself,  through 
experiences  of  struggle  with  himself  and  with  nature; 
experiences  of  repentance  and  remorse,  of  faith  and 
love  and  hope,  such  as  agitate  man's  nature  to  its  in- 
most places  of  devotion  and  of  decision,  unlock  and 
develop  its  hidden  powers  silent  in  the  sleep  of  nature, 
and  yet  give  to  man's  communion  with  God  and  to  all 
his  achievement  upon  high  places  of  the  spirit,  the 
infinite  and  pathetic  depth  known  by  the  prodigal 
returning;  known  by  those  who  have  sinned  greatly 
and  greatly  have  been  forgiven,  and  from  whom, 
through  all  the  greatness  that  is  to  be,  boasting  is  taken 
away. 

With  this  idea  of  the  order  of  the  world  as  an  order 
of  divine  grace  and  redemption,  the  system  of  natural 
and  spiritual  things  in  which  we  have  our  being  and 
under  whose  conditions  we  live  our  life,  is  seen,  with 
all  its  fearful  divisions  and  antagonisms,  to  be  no 
chaos,  no  dualism  or  pluralism  of  irreconcilable  forces, 
but  what  reason  demands  it  to  be — an  order  one  and 
intelligible.  It  is  one  and  intelligible  in  that  through 
all  its  structure  and  process,  including  whatever  most 
tries  and  bafifles  us,  reason  and  righteousness  and  love 
are  supreme ;  the  righteousness  and  reason  and  love 
of  the  God  who  is  the  Father  of  our  spirits  and  the 
source  of  the  whole  of  nature ;  and  who  is  seeking, 
through  ways  that  we  would  not  have  chosen,  to  make 
us  free,  but  in  our  freedom  one  with  Himself  in  those 


308    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

very  characters  of  reason,  of  righteousness,  of  love; 
one  with  Him  in  these,  and  thus  one  with  Him  in  His 
eternal  life.  Such  a  life  of  man  from  God,  and  such 
perilous  freedom;  such  a  grace  of  God  over  against 
our  sin;  such  a  salvation  of  man  and  such  eternal 
life; — these,  whether  we  consciously  recognise  them 
or  no,  are  the  inner  principles  of  our  religious  life; 
and  to  reason,  if  it  can  accept  them,  they  give  a  way — 
I  think  the  only  way — in  which  its  demand  can  be 
satisfied;  for,  in  their  light  the  apparent  tragedy  and 
moral  chaos  of  our  struggle  upon  the  earth  is  seen  to 
have  meaning,  to  have  purpose,  to  have  rational  unity. 

With  this  view  of  the  process  of  reality  as  a  pro- 
cess of  spirit  and  of  salvation,  my  task  is  ended.  Yet 
in  a  very  deep  sense  all  this  is  only  the  beginning  of 
theology.  Having  seen  that  we  can  make  the  order 
of  the  world  intelligible  to  ourselves  only  by  viewing 
it  as  an  order  of  saving  grace,  we  have  next  to  study 
man's  history  upon  the  earth  as  the  actual  movement 
of  that  redemptive  process.  Here  all  the  historical 
disciplines  of  theology  open  before  us;  open  before 
us  in  the  widest  sense  in  which  they  can  be  taken. 
On  this  historical  side  of  his  work,  the  theologian  has 
to  consider  the  religious  consciousness  of  mankind  as 
a  growing  consciousness  of  sin  and  of  salvation  from 
sin ;  he  has  to  consider  the  shaping  of  that  history  by 
priest,  by  lawgiver,  by  prophet,  and  by  the  forces  in 
the  heart  of  man  which  these  at  once  express  and 
arouse  from  sleep;  he  has  to  deal  with  the  literatures 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  REDEMPTION    309 

that,  slowly  gathered  form  and  are  instinct  for  ever 
with  the  passions  and  the  life  of  the  religion  in  which 
they  arose.  An  altogether  lesser  place,  but  still  an  im- 
portant one,  he  has  to  give  to  that  later  literature  of 
creed  and  symbol  in  which  the  same  religious  con- 
sciousness attempted — usually  under  stress  of  external 
forces  and  hence  with  grave  injustice  to  itself — to  work 
out  its  own  intellectual  or  scientific  interpretation.  And 
not  this  alone.  In  the  things  that  are  called  secular,  in 
the  movements  that  have  been  fateful  for  humanity  and 
its  civilisation,  still  more  in  the  natural  forces  and  in- 
fluences that  work  perpetually  in  the  life  and  upon  the 
heart  of  man — forces  of  nature  and  natural  affection, 
of  hunger  and  cold,  of  suffering  and  hope,  the  daily 
light  of  the  eyes,  the  daily  labour  of  the  hands — the 
theologian  must  seek  as  he  can  for  a  hidden  wisdom, 
a  saving  power  of  God  such  as  makes  salvation  the 
inner  reality  of  the  whole  of  nature.  But  in  all  this 
historical  work  of  the  theologian,  one  thing  is  central; 
central  and  thus  in  the  deepest  sense  first  and  funda- 
mental. That  is  his  never-finished  consideration,  in  a 
multitude  of  historical  studies,  of  the  determinative 
place  taken  by  the  founder  of  Christianity;  studies 
whose  significance  we  see  only  when  we  remember 
that  in  spiritual  things  to  determine  is  to  create,  so  that 
Jesus  in  having  the  determinative  place  in  human  his- 
tory stands  central  to  the  whole  detailed  process  of  the 
making  of  man.  The  historical  disciplines  of  theology, 
with  their  centre  in  the  New  Testament,  have  to  trace 
the  actual  course  of  mankind,  and  of  the  making  of 


310    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

mankind,  upon  the  earth ;  the  actual  process  in  which 
our  hfe — our  thought,  our  morality,  our  religion,  our 
whole  intellectual  and  practical  consciousness  of  the 
world  and  of  ourselves — has  come  to  be  what  it  is. 
And  that  process,  to  the  man  who  seeks  from  the  point 
of  view  which  we  have  now  reached  to  regard  it  as  a 
whole,  is  in  its  essential  movement  nothing  other  than 
a  process  of  grace  and  redemption ;  a  process  in  which 
sin  is  overcome ;  and  overcome  in  the  only  way  possible 
in  a  spiritual  order — -by  the  winning  of  the  will  of  man 
back  to  unity  with  the  will  and  the  way  of  God.  What 
Jesus,  in  His  supreme  place  in  the  actual  course  and 
movement  of  human  history,  stands  for,  alike  in  His 
own  consciousness  of  Himself  and  in  the  oecumenical 
consciousness  of  His  followers,  is  grace  and  redemp- 
tion; the  love  of  the  Father,  and  the  return  to  Him 
of  the  sinful  children  who  have  awakened  to  the  reality 
of  that  love.  Of  that  redemption  and  return  Jesus 
is  not  only,  by  revealing  light,  the  prophet ;  He  is  also 
the  accomplisher ;  the  accomplisher  through  hope  and 
love.  His  nature,  as  at  once  God  and  man,  brought 
near  to  the  heart  of  man,  cast  down  before  God,  the 
hope  of  salvation;  for  it  showed  the  possible  union  in 
one  nature  of  the  divine  and  the  human.  And  when 
He,  the  Son  of  God,  took  it  upon  Him  to  be  the  Son 
of  Man,  took  it  upon  Him  to  suffer  and  to  be  tempted 
and  to  be  lifted  up  upon  the  cross,  what  was  revealed 
in  that  life  and  in  that  death,  was  God,  the  author 
of  our  human  lot,  participating  in  its  sorrows ;  so  that 
the  tragedy  of  man's  life  was  seen  to  be  not  man's 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  REDEMPTION    311 

tragedy  alone,  but  a  tragedy  which  God  also  had  sub- 
mitted Himself  to  undergo,  in  order  that  at  the  last 
He  might  have  about  Him  children  and  the  love  of 
children^the  innumerable  people  of  the  Jerusalem 
which  is  on  high  and  is  the  mother  of  us  all.  The 
heart  of  man — if  we  may  permit  ourselves  to  dwell 
upon  that  aspect  of  the  infinite  deep  which  is  easiest 
of  apprehension — the  heart  of  man  lost  its  anger 
against  the  God  who  gave  to  man  a  tragic  fate,  subject- 
ing him  through  nature  to  sin ;  lost  its  anger,  and  saw 
that  God  is  love,  and  that  His  love  is  at  the  heart 
of  all  things;  and  so  was  won  to  God  again  as  to  a 
Father  and  a  home.  So  it  was  that  the  kindly  Son  of 
Man,  in  drawing  all  men  unto  Him,  drew  them  not  to 
Himself  alone,  as  simply  to  an  individual  saviour  who 
suffered  for  man  and  thus  won  man's  love ;  but  drew 
them  also  to  the  Father  who  sent  Him,  and  was  in 
Him  reconciling  the  world  to  Himself. 

Theology,  then,  means  nothing  less  than  the  total 
movement  of  human  history,  read — so  far  as  its  out- 
lines can  be  recovered — in  the  light  of  its  intelligible 
unity  as  holding  together  in  Christ,  centring  in  His 
mission,  and  being  thus  in  the  unity  of  a  divine  plan 
a  single  intelligible  system.  And  this  means  that  Christ 
is  the  centre  to  nature  as  to  history;  for  history  and 
nature  form  one  reality.  It  is  only  too  true  that  in 
this  our  insight  into  the  meaning  of  details  is  most 
strictly  limited.  We  "see  not  to  the  close,"  and  hence 
we  cannot  tell  how  this  or  that  detail  of  nature  is 
related  organically  to  the  mission  of  Jesus,  to  salva- 


313    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

tion,  to  the  redemptive  process  of  the  world.  Yet,  as 
must  be  pointed  out  in  a  moment,  some  things  we  can 
see:  how  natural  ministrations  siirround  Christ's  cen- 
tral work,  co-operating  with  Him  because,  as  we  must 
believe,  they  too  were  created  in  Him  and  through 
them  He  works  His  work ;  natural  ministrations — the 
affections  of  home  and  society,  the  solemnities  and 
consolations  of  natural  beauty,  nay,  even  natural  evils 
of  pain  and  cold  and  hunger  and  the  inborn  inequalities 
of  men.  But  here  our  concern  is  not  with  the  details 
but  with  the  general  fact  that  as  with  history  so  with 
nature :  by  viewing  it  as  the  movement,  or  as  organic 
to  the  movement,  of  a  redemptive  process  which  has 
its  visible  and  determinative  centre  in  the  mission  of 
Jesus,  we  can  see  it,  more  clearly  than  in  any  other 
way  or  from  any  other  point  of  view,  as  a  single  intel- 
ligible system,  a  system  which  has  the  unity  of  a  divine 
plan.  And  with  that  we  can  go  back  to  an  earlier  for- 
mula and  give  it  a  deeper  meaning.  Nature,  we  said, 
rises  to  consciousness  of  itself  in  the  human  soul;  in 
man  and  man's  civilisation,  in  man's  labour  and  science, 
morality  and  religion,  the  principle  which  is  at  work 
in  nature  reveals  itself  more  clearly;  to  put  it  in  a 
useful  formula,  nature  reveals  its  reality  in  man, 
and  in  that  sense  "spirit  is  the  truth  of  nature."  But 
now  we  see  that  that  statement,  true  as  far  as  it  goes, 
does  not  go  far  enough.  We  must  now  say  that  it  is 
in  Christ  that  nature  comes  to  the  true  consciousness 
of  itself;  in  Christ  that  nature  reveals  its  true  and 
eternal    principle.      In    that    profounder    and    more 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  REDEMPTION    313 

searching  sense,  spirit  is  the  truth  of  nature.  But  the 
two  senses  of  the  statement  do  not  stand  apart  in 
radical  separation.  The  one  is,  if  I  may  so  put  it, 
both  the  source  and  the  fulfihnent  of  the  other.  The 
Son  of  God  is  the  Son  of  Man ;  that  which  is  revealed 
in  Christ  is  the  potentiality  of  man,  the  hope  of  man, 
the  goal  toward  which  the  salvation  of  man  perpet- 
ually must  move.  Nature,  we  may  say,  is  rising  to 
consciousness  of  itself  in  man  and  in  man's  civilisation ; 
but  the  consciousness  does  justice  to  itself  only  in 
Christ  and  in  the  spiritual  histories  to  which  Christ 
gives  rise.  Spirit  is  the  truth  of  nature;  but  the  truth 
of  spirit  is  Christ  and  that  ideal  Christian  conscious- 
ness in  the  progressive  realisation  of  which  lies  the 
hope  of  man  and  of  man's  society. 

But  I  must  make  clear  one  thing  which  this  refer- 
ence to  the  historical  disciplines  of  theology  does  not 
mean.  It  does  not  mean  that  we  first  work  out  ab- 
stractly a  Christian  philosophy,  involving  a  philosophy 
of  history,  and  then  turn  to  the  actual  movement  of 
history  to  force  that  scheme  upon  it  and  thus  to  declare 
that  the  movement  of  history  is  the  movement  of  a 
divine  process  of  redemption.  On  the  contrary,  the 
ideas  in  which  this  Christian  philosophy  of  history 
culminates  are  ideas  which  the  history  itself  has 
brought  with  it.  Just  as  philosophy  does  not  stand 
outside  of  experience,  but  rather  is  experience  coming 
to  more  thorough  self-consciousness,  more  thorough 
awareness  of  its  own  nature  and  meaning  and  impli- 
cations— is,  in  a  word,  experience  sinking  deeper  into 


314    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

itself  and  interpreting  itself  through  an  insight  into 
its  universal  relations — so  the  Christian  philosophy  of 
history  is  not  something  that  arises  outside  of  history, 
and  then  forces  its  scheme  upon  history.  It  is  some- 
thing that  arises  in  history  and  is  history  interpreting 
itself ;  is  history  becoming  conscious  of  its  own  mean- 
ing. Nor  could  philosophy  of  history — one  might  as 
well  say  simply  "philosophy"  or  "theology,"  since  there 
is  no  philosophy  or  theology  which  is  not  in  ultimate 
significance  philosophy  of  history — very  well  arise  in 
any  other  way.  As  was  said  earlier,  it  is  in  the  practical 
life,  where  our  consciousness  is  most  intensely  and 
penetratingly  in  touch  with  the  reality  of  things,  and 
where  reflexion  when  it  at  last  arises  is  deepest  and 
most  searching,  that  the  great  ideas  which  interpret 
the  world  to  our  intelligence  are  most  likely  to  be  sug- 
gested. When  we  give  way  to  the  notion  that  it  is 
the  procedure  of  theology  and  philosophy  to  take  leave 
of  life  in  order  to  understand  life,  we  miss  the  nature 
alike  of  life  and  of  theology,  alike  of  experience  and 
of  revelation.  To  put  the  matter  summarily,  it  is  in 
experience — in  experience,  of  which  theory  and  prac- 
tice, action  and  reflexion,  are  the  correlative  and  in- 
separable aspects — that  the  interpretation  of  expe- 
rience must  arise.  And  so  it  is  here.  The  Christian 
understanding  of  history  as  being  in  its  essential  and 
vital  movement  a  process  of  grace  and  redemption,  a 
process  in  which  sinful  hearts  are  reconciled  and 
brought  to  a  unity  of  affection  and  of  purpose  with 
the  Father's  heart — the  only  overcoming  of  sin  that 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  REDEMPTION    315 

can  mean  anything  in  the  reaHties  of  a  genuinely 
spiritual  universe — this  Christian  understanding  of 
history,  which  in  its  organic  principles  it  is  the  per- 
petual task  of  theology  to  bring  to  clearer  conscious- 
ness of  itself,  and  to  consider  as  fulfilling  the  demand 
of  man's  whole  nature,  rational  and  religious,  has 
arisen  in  experience  and  as  explaining  experience ;  it 
has  arisen  in  and  as  actual  historical  experiences,  and 
in  its  turn  has  determined  the  further  course  of  expe- 
rience and  of  history.  It  is  only  in  this,  indeed,  that 
the  final  meaning  appears  of  the  statement  made  in  the 
first  lecture  that  at  the  end  of  the  discussion  we  should 
be  brought  back  to  the  historical  disciplines  of  the- 
ology from  which  at  the  beginning  we  set  out.  That 
statement  can  now  be  put  in  this  better  way,  that  we 
have  all  along  been  concerned  with  the  material  dealt 
with  in  those  historical  disciplines;  have  been  trying 
to  penetrate  more  deeply  into  the  nature  of  that  mate- 
rial than  can  be  done  simply  by  taking  its  matters  of 
fact  in  detail ;  have  been  seeking  to  grasp  the  general 
nature,  the  universal  or  eternal  relations,  of  the  expe- 
rience whose  detailed  facts  the  historical  disciplines  of 
theology  set  forth  in  the  temporal  order  of  their  occur- 
rence. The  history  which  now  is  enacting  upon  the 
earth — the  history  of  which  we  have  to  say  both  that 
men  are  making  it  and  that  it  is  the  present  stage  in 
the  making  of  man — this  present  history  or  experience 
of  man  has  been  led  up  to,  and  in  that  sense  made  pos- 
sible, by  the  history  which  preceded  it;  the  history 
whose  determinative  persons  and  events  are  those  of 


316    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

the  New  Testament,  and  which,  with  its  centre  and 
eternal  principle  in  those  events  and  persons,  has 
moved  onward  from  the  beginnings  of  human  time 
as  the  concrete  course  of  a  redemption  in  which  sinful 
man,  won  to  the  love  of  God,  overcomes  his  sin.  To 
recover  the  facts  of  that  history — so  far  as  they  are 
recoverable — and  to  make  them  living  to  us,  is  the  busi- 
ness of  theology  as  historical.  But  to  ask  after  the 
nature  of  the  principle  which  in  all  this  history  has 
revealed  and  is  revealing  itself,  is  the  business  of  the- 
ology as  philosophical.  It  is  with  the  latter — no  new 
thing,  but  an  old  and  never-ceasing  labour  of  the  Chris- 
tian mind — that  we  have  here  been  concerned ;  and  if, 
in  working  together  at  that  ancient  and  perpetual  task, 
we  have  had  any  success  at  all,  we  can  turn  with  deeper 
intelligence  and  a  deeper  appreciation  to  the  study  of 
the  history  as  history,  dealing  with  its  detail  of  facts 
and  events  as  any  scrupulous  historian  would,  but  see- 
ing in  those  events  and  facts,  when  taken  as  a  whole, 
a  bringing  near  of  salvation  to  the  race  of  man,  and 
in  that  sense  the  establishing  for  man  of  eternal  life. 

Our  work  has  thus  been,  in  a  sense,  a  clearing  of 
the  gateway  into  the  historical  studies  of  theology; 
specially  for  those  who,  if  they  are  to  be  religious, 
must  have  their  religion  not  in  hostility,  but  in  recon- 
ciliation and  alliance,  with  modern  thought  and  modern 
science.  Yet  not  for  those  alone ;  for  surely  one  need 
not  be  in  trouble  of  mind  to  make  positive  insight  a 
thing  of  value— a  help  in  the  deepening  of  life.  Nor 
must  we  push  too  far  the  metaphor  of  clearing  the 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  REDEMPTION    317 

gateway  into  historical  study.  For  if  what  has  just 
been  said  is  at  all  true,  theology  as  philosophical  and 
theology  as  historical — or,  if  the  terms  be  preferred, 
philosophy  of  religion  and  history  of  religion — are  cor- 
relative. The  theology  or  philosophy  without  the  his- 
tory (to  adapt  to  this  use  a  Kantian  formula)  is  empty. 
And  the  history  without  the  philosophy  is  blind ; 
though  this  case  is  never  quite  realised;  for  we  all 
carry  a  philosophy  within  us ;  clearly  or  confusedly 
we  have  a  sense  of  the  meaning  of  our  life  and  of  the 
meaning  of  the  history  in  which  our  life  has  its  being. 
Indeed,  I  might  sum  up  our  work  here  by  saying  that 
it  has  throughout  been  concerned  with  our  sense  of 
the  meaning  of  our  life;  and  with  that  sense  where  it 
is  acutest — in  the  affections,  the  contemplations,  the 
activities  which  are  religion.  To  make  clearer  to  our 
own  minds  the  sense  of  the  meaning  of  life  which 
moves  in  Christian  hearts,  the  sense  of  the  meaning 
of  life  which  has  its  being  in  all  Christian  love  of  God 
and  all  Christian  devotion  to  the  welfare  of  men ;  and 
to  see  in  that  sense  of  the  meaning  of  life,  when  made 
explicit,  the  fulfilment,  so  far  as  in  a  developing  expe- 
rience is  possible,  of  the  fundamental  demands  of  rea- 
son ;  so  that  in  the  holding  and  practising  of  it,  our 
nature  is  at  one  with  itself  and  we  have  the  true  unity 
of  experience: — that  has  been  our  task.  It  is  in  the 
attempt  to  perform  that  task  that  we  have  come  to 
the  various  views  which  now  are  before  us  as  a  single 
interpretation  of  life,  all  whose  parts  must  stand  or 
fall  together :  the  view  that  reality  is  a  spiritual  society, 


318    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

in  which  God  seeks  to  fulfil  Himself  in  communion 
with  His  own;  that  creation,  including  the  whole  of 
nature,  is  the  gradual  process  of  the  bringing  into 
being  of  such  a  society;  that  the  form  of  reality  is 
therefore  history;  that  the  concrete  content  of  history 
is  a  process  of  redemption  wherein  sinful  man,  won 
by  the  reconciling  love  of  God  in  its  innumerable 
ministries  of  order,  of  equity,  of  grace,  becomes  in 
achieved  freedom  of  spirit  the  loyal  son  of  God;  that 
the  supreme  revealer  and  supreme  accomplisher  of 
redemption  is  Jesus  Christ,  whose  appearance  upon 
the  earth  was  the  critical  and  determinative  point  of 
human  history,  the  visible  centre  in  which  the  divine 
plan  of  the  whole  is  brought  to  light — brought  to  light 
in  a  love  which  achieves  the  purpose  that  it  reveals. 

I  should  be  glad  to  be  permitted  to  set  down  two 
further  remarks.  The  one  is  connected  with  the 
oecumenical  doctrine  of  the  Person  of  Christ,  as  the 
historical  individual  by  whom  and  in  whom  our  salva- 
tion is  brought  near  to  us ;  the  other  with  what  in  the 
older  language  of  theology  was  called  "general  re- 
demption"— the  attempt  of  the  theologian  to  see  in 
the  whole  process  of  reality  the  working  of  the  prin- 
ciple which,  on  the  oecumenical  view,  eternally  is 
summed  up  in  Christ. 

First,  with  regard  to  the  oecumenical  Christology. 
The  characteristic  difficulties  of  the  modern  mind  in 
accepting  the  doctrine  of  the  eternal  generation  of  the 
Son,  have  their  roots  in  modern  intellectual  history 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  REDEMPTION    319 

and  can  be  discussed  on  their  own  merits;  but  in  the 
doctrine  itself,  there  is  no  intrinsic  or  philosophical 
difficulty.  There  is,  in  fact,  less  difficulty  in  it  than 
in  something  to  which  we  have  here  already  been  led. 
In  the  attempt  to  make  intelligible  to  ourselves  how 
we  can  be  capable  at  all  of  the  many-sided  experience 
which  is  our  life,  we  have  been  driven  to  believe 
(though  we  could  not  present  the  process  to  ourselves 
under  any  form  of  imagination)  that  God  reproduces 
Himself,  under  limitations,  in  and  as  the  human  soul. 
The  doctrine  that  God  reproduces  Himself  eternally 
in  a  Son  who  shares  all  His  perfection,  moves  under 
far  less  difficulty  than  that.  It  is  far  easier  to  think 
of  a  perfect  spirit  reproducing  himself  in  a  perfect 
spirit  than  to  think  of  him  reproducing  and  realising 
himself  in  imperfect  spirits  and  a  troubled  history. 
In  fact,  the  question  how  the  perfect  God  can  give  rise 
to  the  imperfect  soul,  the  tragic  and  sinful  history,  of 
man,  is  precisely  the  heart  of  difficulty  in  all  the  diffi- 
culties of  theology  and  philosophy.  But  the  cecumeni- 
cal  doctrine  of  an  eternal  Sonship  is  not  merely  easy 
in  the  sense  of  having  no  intrinsic  difficulties.  It  is 
a  doctrine  toward  which  we  are  driven  by  grave  posi- 
tive considerations.  For  on  the  one  hand  (as  already 
Plato  had  seen)  we  are  compelled  to  think  of  God  as 
essentially  self-communicative;  in  the  language  of  the 
creeds,  as  essentially  generative  or  begetting.  It  is  of 
the  essence  of  good  to  be  love  and  to  communicate 
itself.  To  put  it  negatively,  it  is  impossible  to  think 
of  God  as  a  Deity  solitary,  inert,  idle;  such  a  God 


320    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

would  be  no  God.  It  is  equally  impossible  to  think  of 
Him  as  exerting  Himself  in  any  activity  which  is  ex- 
ternal and  indifferent  to  His  own  nature.  And  the 
activity  in  which  He  thus  puts  forth,  thus  expresses 
and  fulfils,  His  nature,  must  be  one  in  which  late  or 
soon — some  such  qualification  we  must  make  in  order 
to  leave  all  possible  scope  for  the  idea  that  God  has  a 
joy  in  the  physical  order  of  the  world  for  its  own 
sake — He  brings  into  being  spirits  who  can  respond 
to  Him ;  can  have  communion  and  intercourse  with 
Him  in  those  things  which  are  His  very  nature.  That, 
in  fact,  is  the  key  to  the  whole  question  of  the  creation 
of  man,  and  the  relation  of  man's  life  to  God ;  it  is  the 
clue  or  guiding  thought  of  the  whole  view  of  the  world 
which  here  we  have  been  following  in  outline.  But 
when  we  accept  that  view  of  the  world;  when  we  feel 
convinced  that  the  life  of  man  (however  little  insight 
we  as  yet  have  into  the  complete  divine  interpretation 
of  the  details)  has  its  being  in  God's  communication 
of  Himself,  and  is,  in  the  sense  earlier  defined,  an 
organic  part  of  the  self-fulfilment  and  experience  of 
God; — when  we  have  accepted  that  position,  a  prob- 
lem still  haunts  us.  When  we  have  learned  to  think 
of  God  as  seeking  a  realisation  of  Himself  in  the  spirit- 
ual history  of  mankind  and  of  whatever  other  finite 
or  "created"  spirits  there  may  be,  the  question  returns : 
Even  though  such  spiritual  histories  have  their  organic 
place  in  God's  realisation  of  Himself,  yet  does  not 
that  realisation  demand  far  more  than  such  histories? 
For  let  us  recall  what  we  have  found  ourselves  com- 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  REDEMPTION    321 

pelled  to  believe  about  human  individuality,  and  about 
the  history  which  is  its  development.  The  growth  of 
human  individuality  means  that  each  of  us  comes  to 
be  a  particular  self,  occupying  a  particular  place  and 
station  in  the  universe,  because  each  of  us,  while  Hm- 
ited  to  his  own  place  and  station,  yet  in  that  place  and 
station  is  animated  by  the  principle  of  the  whole.  It 
is  because  the  individual,  with  all  his  limitations,  is 
thus  animated  by  the  principle  of  the  whole,  that  he 
can  make  his  life  a  continual  ivepyua  ^vx^j's;  can 
continually  energise  from  the  point  of  view  of  the 
whole;  can  make  his  very  limitations  a  means  to  his 
own  development  and  the  world's  development,  by 
more  and  more  apprehending  them  in  their  relation 
to  the  total  or  objective  system  of  reality  and  hence 
as  ways  of  life  rather  than  denials  of  life.  But  by  the 
very  terms  of  the  case,  this  animation  of  the  individual 
is  the  animation  of  a  part  by  the  principle  of  the 
whole;  the  animation  of  a  limited  life  by  the  principle 
of  the  system  or  society  in  which  it  has  its  being,  so 
that  the  limited  life  is  not  a  mere  individual,  but  is  able, 
in  thought  and  conduct,  in  judgment  and  influence, 
to  take  the  point  of  view  of  the  whole  society  or  system 
of  which  it  is  a  member.  To  state  the  matter  more  in 
detail,  reality,  in  its  objective  or  eternal  truth,  is  the 
total  temporal  process  in  its  unity  in  and  for  the  crea- 
tive consciousness  of  God.  Our  growth  in  knowledge 
means  our  increasing  apprehension  of  that  reality;  a 
reality  of  which  we  ourselves  are  organic  parts,  so 
that  the  more  truly  objective  our  thought  becomes,  the 


333    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

more  does  it  constitute  a  true  self-consciousness.  Our 
growth  in  knowledge,  in  other  words,  is  the  gradual 
building  up  in  us  of  an  eternal  consciousness,  a  con- 
sciousness which  in  the  true  form  of  its  idea  would 
be  a  complete  or  absolute  intuition.  While  our  total 
or  practical  growth,  so  far  as  it  is  truly  moral  or  reli- 
gious, means  also  the  formation  in  us  of  an  eternal 
consciousness ;  a  character  and  a  will  which  in  the  true 
form  of  their  idea — that  is,  as  they  are  in  God — are 
eternal.  All  this  growth,  all  this  formation  in  us  of 
a  knowledge,  a  will,  a  character,  which  so  far  as 
they  are  true  are  eternal — the  fact,  in  one  word,  that 
we  have  individuality  at  all,  and  in  that  individuality 
are  capable  of  growing  in  truth  and  goodness  and  like- 
ness to  God — is  possible  because,  while  each  of  us  as 
an  individual  is  a  very  limited  part  of  the  whole,  yet 
each  of  us  is  implicitly  animated  by  the  principle  of 
the  whole ;  by  the  recognised  or  unrecognised  indwell- 
ing of  God.  Yet  all  that  does  not  make  us  adequate 
objects  of  the  divine  communion,  in  the  sense  that  in 
our  history,  or  any  number  of  such  histories,  God 
could  have  His  complete  realisation  of  Himself.  The 
fact  that  eternity  is  the  total  content  and  process  of 
time  in  its  unity  in  the  consciousness  of  God,  does 
not  close  the  question.  With  regard  to  the  object  of 
the  communion  of  God,  it  is  the  content  of  eternity 
(the  nature  and  character  of  the  spirits  that  have  their 
life  in  its  temporal  process),  and  not  the  mere  eter- 
nity, which  is  the  important  matter.  And  when  we 
consider  the  nature  and  character  of  man,  or  of  any 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  REDEMPTION    323 

spiritual  race  that  has  its  life  under  similar  condi- 
tions, we  see  at  once  the  limitations  which  now  make 
us,  and  apparently  will  make  us  for  ever,  inadequate 
(in  the  sense  indicated  a  moment  ago)  as  the  objects 
of  the  communion  of  God ;  limitations  that  may  be 
suggested  by  the  two  words,  time  and  function.  First, 
the  limitation  with  regard  to  time.  God  is  in  no  sense 
in  time.  He  has  time  in  Him.  He  possesses  time  as 
eternity;  in  one  complete  grasp  or  intuition  He  pre- 
sents to  Himself  the  whole  concrete  content  of  time. 
But  we,  while  we  have  time  in  us  as  a  synthetic  form 
of  our  consciousness,  and  only  so  are  able  to  be  spirit- 
ual individuals,  capable  of  apprehending  our  life  and 
the  life  of  our  race  as  a  history  and  development  in 
time,  yet  have  time  in  us,  not  intuitively  or  in  com- 
pleteness, but  only  under  the  limitation  which  is  ex- 
pressed by  saying  that,  while  we  have  time  in  us,  we 
are  also  in  time,  and  receive  our  life  under  the  form 
of  development.  The  growth  of  our  individuality  in 
all  its  aspects  of  labour  and  affection,  science  and  art, 
morality  and  religion,  while  it  is  a  gradual  entering 
into  possession  of  that  which  in  its  true  being  is  eter- 
nal, yet  is  itself,  as  the  very  terms  indicate,  a  process 
in  time.  And  not  that  only ;  but  there  was  a  time  when 
we  and  all  our  race  were  not;  and  it  is  at  least  con- 
ceivable that  our  life  will  never  lay  aside  the  form  of 
time  and  of  development.  It  is  but  stating  the  matter 
universally,  rather  than  merely  with  regard  to  time, 
to  point  out  that,  while  we  indeed  have  the  principle 
of  the  whole  in  us,  yet  it  is  in  such  a  way  that  we  are 


324    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

incomplete  individuals  within  the  whole.  The  ideals 
which  animate  us  through  the  presence  of  that  prin- 
ciple in  us,  are,  when  we  become  clearly  conscious 
of  them,  ideals  of  the  absolute :  the  knowledge  which 
would  need  no  more  revising — the  knowledge  which 
in  its  transparency  and  systematic  completeness  would 
be  a  single  intuition  of  the  whole  of  reality  and  thus 
would  be  eternal ;  the  goodness  which  eternally  is  real 
in  God  as  God's  own  character.  But  it  does  not  follow 
that  we  are  ever  completely  to  realise  those  ideals. 
As  we  have  seen,  the  validity  of  our  effort  after  knowl- 
edge and  goodness  and  likeness  to  God,  does  not  in- 
volve that  tve  should  completely  realise  that  absolute 
intuition,  that  eternal  character.  It  does  involve,  first, 
that  those  ideals  should  be  true  of  reality — should  be 
completely  or  eternally  realised  in  God,  who  is  the 
source  whence  they  are  communicated  to  us ;  and 
secondly,  that  there  should  be  open  to  us,  either  the 
complete  realisation  of  those  ideals,  or  (what  we  must 
take  to  be  actually  the  case)  the  possibility  of  moving 
for  ever,  in  a  progressive  life,  toward  that  complete 
realisation ;  becoming  more  and  more  like  God,  yet 
never  entering  upon  that  absolute  likeness  which,  ac- 
cording to  the  oecumenical  theology,  the  only  begotten 
Son  has  eternally.^ — When  we  turn  to  the  second  of 
the  headings  suggested  a  moment  ago,  it  is  really  the 
same  point  in  a  different  form  of  statement.  While 
the  principle  of  the  whole  is  in  us,  so  that  we  are 
animated  by  that  sense  of  the  whole  without  which 

1  Cf.  supra,  latter  part  of  note  to  p.  124. 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  REDEMPTION    325 

there  could  be  no  spiritual  life,  no  life  of  science  or 
morality  or  religion,  at  all,  yet  it  has  so  individualised 
itself  in  each  of  us,  that  each  of  us  is  only  a  very  small 
fragment  of  the  infinite  whole.  For  every  human 
individual  there  go  with  the  limitations  of  time,  limi- 
tations in  function,  and  thus  in  quantity  and  quality 
of  spiritual  being.  Each  of  us  has  a  specific  quality 
which  no  other  individual  in  the  universe  quite  has, 
or  can  have;  if  nothing  else,  mere  differences  in  par- 
ticular experience  would  bring  that  about.  And  each 
of  us,  thus  endowed  and  dififerentiated,  has  a  station 
to  fill,  a  function  to  perform,  which  no  other  quite 
has.  Our  specific  quality  and  function — what  makes 
us  to  be  definite  realities,  having  definite  and  assign- 
able places  in  the  one  system  of  things — is  in  that 
sense  our  limitation.  Nor  can  we  conceive  any  tran- 
scending of  that  limitation.  Our  powers  and  energies, 
as  we  fill  our  particular  stations,  may  immensely  in- 
crease; but  we  always  shall  be  filling  particular  sta- 
tions within  the  one  system  of  things.  That  is  to  say, 
no  individual  after  our  human  type,  no  individual 
created  in  time  and  through  a  temporal  process,  can 
be  adequate  to  the  communion  of  God.  His  true  life, 
indeed,  is  communion  with  God ;  and  we  must  even 
believe  that  God's  communion  with  him  is  part  of 
God's  blessedness;  but  he  is  not  adequate  to  that 
communion  in  the  sense  of  fulfilling  it.  Nor  would 
any  sum  or  system  of  such  individuals  be  thus  ade- 
quate ;  a  system  and  history  of  incomplete  respondents 
would  not  make  with  God  the  perfect  communion  in 


326    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

which  each  side  is  adequate  to  the  other.  What  is 
demanded  is  an  eternal,  an  eternally  perfect  and  divine, 
individual,  and  the  eternal  generation  of  such  an  indi- 
vidual by  God ;  God  who,  therefore,  eternally  is  Father. 
And  the  doctrine  of  the  eternal  begetting  of  the  Son — 
nay,  the  whole  doctrine  of  an  eternal  Trinity  in  God — • 
surely  meets  that  very  demand ;  so  far,  at  any  rate, 
as  our  minds  can  make  any  way  in  this  question  at  all. 
Eternally  there  is  a  society  in  the  Godhead;  eternally 
the  activities  and  affections  of  a  spiritual  society  in 
which  each  of  the  members  is  to  the  others  an  ade- 
quate object  of  love  and  communion.  And  if  it  be 
urged  that  such  a  question  lies  beyond  our  field;  that 
when  we  have  made  our  history,  our  world  of  expe- 
rience, intelligible  to  ourselves  by  viewing  it  as  a  part 
or  factor  in  God's  realisation  of  Himself,  we  have  not 
to  go  on  to  ask  what  more  is  required  for  God's  com- 
plete forth-putting  and  realisation  of  His  nature ; — 
the  answer  is  that  such  an  objection  forgets  the  unity 
of  existence  where  most  it  ought  to  be  remembered; 
forgets  that  the  God  who  is  seeking  a  realisation  of 
Himself  in  human  history,  the  God  who  deals  with 
man,  and  by  reference  to  whom  all  human  problems 
have  their  ultimate  solution,  is  not  God  in  some  ab- 
stract part  or  aspect  of  His  nature,  but  God  in  His 
total  nature.  Though  man  be  but  a  small  part  of  God's 
care,  yet  the  God  who  cares  for  man  is  God  in  the 
completeness  of  His  being,  and  with  His  complete 
realisation  of  Himself  in  view.  Hence  it  may  well  be 
pleaded  that  the  profound  and  speculative  theology  of 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  iREDEMPTION    327 

the  oecumenical  fathers  and  councils — however  un- 
happy it  may  have  been  in  its  subjection  to  the  intel- 
lectualism  of  the  degenerate  Greeks,  and  to  the  tech- 
nical terms  and  the  unethical  mind  of  that  intel- 
lectualism — yet  was  guided  by  a  sound  instinct.  If 
God  be  in  a  real  and  ethical  sense — and  there  is  no 
sound  metaphysical  sense  which  is  not  also  real  and 
ethical — a  Trinity  in  Unity,  then  the  whole  order  of 
natural  and  historical  conditions  in  which  every  com- 
mon man  lives  his  common  life  has  somehow  the  stamp 
of  that  fact  upon  it,  and  is  what  it  is  by  reason  of  that 
fact.  The  Trinitarian  doctrine,  whatever  else  it  is  or 
is  not,  is  not  a  remote  abstraction;  if  it  is  true,  it  is 
the  truth  of  our  common  life,  and  of  the  history  which 
has  been  the  course  of  our  common  life  upon  the  earth. 
Let  me  insist  upon  that.  All  the  truth  there  is,  is 
the  truth  of  our  common  life;  and  our  common  life 
needs,  to  make  it  intelligible,  all  the  truth  there  is. 
To  the  view  of  human  nature  and  of  human  life,  in- 
volved in  such  doctrines  as  those  of  the  Trinity  and 
the  Incarnation,  men  sometimes  object,  not  on  the 
specific  ground  already  discussed,  but  on  the  general 
ground  that  such  a  view  is  too  far-reaching — looks  too 
far  out  into  mystery  and  into  eternity.  But  surely 
the  answer  is  obvious.  For  such  a  thing  as  our  life  is, 
no  explanation  can  be  too  far-reaching,  too  difficult 
with  endeavours  to  see  into  eternity.  Consider  what 
manner  of  thing  our  life  is ;  how  tremendous  the  oppo- 
sition in  it  between  good  and  evil,  between  light  and 
darkness;  how  fearful  the  gulf  that  opens  up  in  the 


328    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

midst  of  the  fairest  things  we  have  or  can  achieve. 
When  people  demand  a  view  of  Hfe  that  shall  have 
none  of  these  difificulties,  none  of  these  endeavours  to 
grasp  the  principle  of  eternity,  I  have  but  to  open  my 
eyes  for  one  half-moment  to  the  actual  life  before  me ; 
to  our  civilisation  which  condemns  multitudes  of  its 
citizens,  not  merely  to  poverty,  but  to  meanness  of 
spirit;  to  any  Christian  home  shattered  by  the  inex- 
plicable wickedness  of  one  of  its  members ;  to  any  child 
depraved  by  reason  of  his  parents'  sin — condemned, 
in  Professor  Royce's  striking  words,  to  a  "fatal  and 
unearned  baseness" ;  to  any  human  being  who  receives 
from  the  wrong-doing  of  another  that  which  is  worse 
than  all  physical  pain,  an  "utter  and  inevitable  cor- 
ruption," an  "endless  moral  degradation" ;  to  all  the 
perpetual  turning  to  self-destruction  and  to  degrada- 
tion of  the  many-sided  powers  that  seemed  given  for 
the  making  and  perpetuation  of  a  world  of  good ; — 
I  have,  I  say,  but  to  open  my  eyes  for  one  half -moment 
to  these  things,  to  know  that  the  demand  for  a  the- 
ology which  has  not  to  concern  itself  with  God's  way 
in  eternity,  is  a  demand  that  has  never  appreciated 
the  force  of  its  own  problem.  When  we  consider  the 
human  experience  which  it  is  the  business  of  the 
CEcumenical  theology,  the  business  of  all  theology  and 
of  all  philosophy,  to  make  intelligible,  the  one  real 
difficulty  about  these  theologies  of  the  eternal  is  that 
they  are  not  difficult  enough,  not  deep  enough,  not 
far-reaching  enough.  Have  they  found,  even  in 
eternity,  anything  deep  enough  and  wide  enough  to 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  REDEMPTION    339 

be  the  explanation  of  so  fearful  a  mingling  of  good 
and  evil  as  the  life  and  history  of  mankind  on  the 
earth  ?  We  are  all  clear,  I  think,  how  high  is  the  place 
we  must  give  to  reason;  even  to  reason  as  the  pro- 
cedure of  the  exact  understanding.  We  all  know  well 
enough  the  truth  of  the  saying  that  no  man  ever  went 
about  to  break  logic  but  in  the  end  logic  broke  him. 
Yet  if  we  were  somehow  shut  up  to  a  choice  between 
the  theology  of  the  Aufkldrung  and  that  of  the  Mystics, 
the  mere  facts  themselves  of  life  would  compel  us, 
in  spite  of  the  measure  of  truth  in  the  Enlightenment, 
to  turn  toward  the  Mystics.  We  talk  impatiently  about 
the  difficulties  of  theology.  W^e  forget  that  the  supreme 
difficulty  is  that  wonderful  and  fearful  thing,  our  life 
itself. 

I  do  not  mean,  indeed,  to  suggest  that  the  oecumeni- 
cal formulation,  or  any  theological  formulation  pos- 
sible in  this  life,  is  an  absolute  finality.  It  may  very 
well  be  that  in  some  life  to  come,  with  clearer  eyes 
and  profounder  intelligence,  we  shall  lay  aside  the 
present  form  of  our  theology.  But  if  so,  I  cannot  free 
myself  from  the  feeling  that  it  will  not  be  to  retreat 
to  some  simplified  theology,  such  as  the  Enlighten- 
ment, with  its  vigorous  but  narrow  understanding, 
demanded ;  it  will  be  to  advance  to  something  still 
profounder  than  the  theology  which,  upon  the  earth, 
the  church  apprehended ;  something  that  will  combine 
a  still  greater  elevation  of  God  above  man,  with  still 
greater  intimacies  between  God  and  man,  between  the 
divine  nature  and  the  whole  course  of  human  and 


330    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

cosmic  history;  something  that  will  thus  be  a  con- 
firmation or  fulfilment  of  the  oecumenical  theology, 
rather  than  a  withdrawal  from  it.  In  any  case,  no 
theology  that  knows  its  own  task,  and  knows  the  life 
of  man,  can  do  other  than  reach  out  into  eternity.  The 
difficulties  are  far-reaching;  so  must  the  answers  be. 
And  in  a  Gospel  which  builds  itself  upon  the  idea  of 
an  eternal  Son  of  God  who  became  the  Son  of  Man, 
and  is  the  centre,  the  organising  principle,  of  the  whole 
scheme  of  human  history; — in  such  a  Gospel  and  such 
a  view  of  the  world,  I  think  we  have  the  synthesis, 
the  whole  of  truth,  of  which  man's  perpetual  spirit  of 
Enlightenment  on  the  one  side,  and  his  perpetual 
Mysticism  on  the  other,  are  the  sundered  and  shattered 
fragments. 

What  I  had  to  urge,  however,  was  that  if  we  accept 
the  view  needed  to  make  our  common  life  intelligible, 
there  is,  in  the  doctrine  of  the  eternal  begetting  of  the 
Son,  no  intrinsic  difficulty  for  reason;  but  on  the 
contrary  the  satisfaction  of  one  of  its  gravest  de- 
mands. And  if  it  be  said  that  the  real  point  of  difficulty 
lies  not  in  an  eternal  relation  of  Father  and  Son  within 
the  Godhead,  but  rather  in  the  question  of  the  relation 
of  Christ,  the  eternal  Son,  to  Jesus  who  had  a  human 
growth  and  thus  a  development  in  time,  the  answer  is 
as  before.  In  such  a  relation,  or  such  an  identity, 
between  an  eternal  being  and  a  being  who  has  a  growth 
and  development  in  time,  there  is  at  least  no  greater 
difficulty  than  is  involved  in  the  position  which  we 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  RHTDEMPTION    331 

have  already  been  compelled  to  accept  in  order  to  ac- 
count for  our  ordinary  experience ;  the  position  that 
God  who  is  perfect  and  eternal,  the  Absolute  Spirit 
of  the  world,  reproduces  Himself  under  limitations 
in  and  as  the  imperfect  and  developing  soul  of  man, 
and  so  makes  that  soul  in  its  imperfection  capable  of 
being  animated  and  put  under  obligation  by  the  idea 
of  the  whole ;  the  idea  which  operates  in  us  as  a  grow- 
ing ideal  of  perfection,  an  ideal  of  a  truer  and  a  better 
which  imply  an  absolute  truth  and  an  absolute  good. 
The  fact  that  we  could  not  present  to  ourselves  under 
any  form  of  imagination  a  process  in  which  an  Abso- 
lute Spirit  thus  gives  rise  to  developing  individual  his- 
tories in  time,  the  fact  that  we  could  not  in  any  sense 
comprehend  such  a  divine  activity  of  self-communica- 
tion as  God  comprehends  it  in  exercising  it,  was  in  the 
one  case  no  argument  against  the  belief  that  such  a 
process  actually  does  take  place,  when  we  were  driven 
to  that  belief  in  order  to  make  intelligible  to  ourselves 
how  it  is  that  we  are  capable  of  experience  at  all. 
Nor,  in  the  other  case,  if  historical  facts  require,  to 
make  them  intelligible,  the  belief  that  the  eternal  Son 
of  God  became  incarnate  as  Jesus  of  Nazareth,  is  the 
belief  ruled  out  by  our  inevitable  inability  to  under- 
stand, as  if  from  within,  the  exact  spiritual  process 
involved ;  an  inability  set  out  in  light  once  more — if 
in  this  I  do  not  speak  with  too  much  unkindness  of  a 
discussion  supremely  valuable  for  its  insistence  upon 
the  unity  and  integrity  of  the  consciousness  of  Jesus — 


332    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

by  the  attempt  of  perhaps  the  most  admirable  theo- 
logian of  our  day  to  work  out  a  psychology  of  the 
Incarnation  in  terms  of  the  subliminal  self. 

This  answer  to  an  objection  should  not  be  pushed 
farther  than  it  can  go.  The  two  cases,  just  set  side 
by  side,  are  not  strictly  parallel.  Both,  indeed,  are 
cases  of  the  relation  of  an  eternal  being  to  a  being  who 
has  a  growth  in  time.  But  the  one  consists  in  the  fact 
that  the  Absolute  Spirit  makes  Himself  the  source  and 
home  of  lesser  spirits ;  the  fact  that  God,  an  eternal 
person,  reproduces  Himself,  under  limitations,  in  the 
growing  personality  of  man.  While  in  the  other  case 
the  personality  is  one  and  continuous;  Christ,  incar- 
nate as  Jesus  of  Nazareth,  is  one  person  with  Christ 
the  eternal  Son.  But  there  is  at  least  no  greater  diffi- 
culty for  reason  in  the  one  case  than  in  the  other ;  no 
greater  difficulty  in  the  ancient  Christology  than  in 
the  account  we  have  just  been  compelled  to  give  of 
the  possibility  of  our  ordinary  experience.  Indeed, 
if  there  is  any  difference,  it  is  the  Christology  which 
is  the  easier.  For  in  attempting  to  account  for  the  pos- 
sibility of  our  experience,  we  have  had  to  believe  that 
God  reproduces  Himself  in  a  soul  which  is  capable  of 
sin  and  actually  becomes  sinful ;  whereas  the  humanity 
of  the  incarnate  Christ  was,  at  the  very  least,  a  sinless 
humanity.  If  I  were  to  venture  upon  any  positive 
suggestion  at  all,  it  would  be  one  stated  only  in  the 
most  general  terms ;  but  in  those  general  terms  faith- 
ful, I  think,  both  to  reason  and  to  the  habitual  lan- 
guage of   our  Lord   in  the   New   Testament.     This, 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  REDEMPTION    333 

namely:  that  the  explanation,  the  possibility,  the  ulti- 
mate basis,  of  the  relation  between  eternal  and  tem- 
poral involved  in  the  Incarnation — the  relation  between 
eternal  and  perfect  deity,  and  a  growing  human  per- 
sonality— lies  in  the  Father;  and  being  in  the  Father, 
it  was  not  foreign  to  the  Son  but  was  His  life  of  life. 
For,  as  we  have  seen,  what  renders  the  life  of  man 
possible  is  a  reproduction  of  Himself,  a  communica- 
tion of  Himself,  on  the  part  of  God.  The  ideal  prin- 
ciple of  humanity,  that  is  to  say,  is  eternally  in  God; 
in  that  sense  the  divine  nature  contains  eternally  the 
human.  The  nature  which  in  God  is  absolute,  is 
eternal,  is  perfect,  is  in  man  potentially ;  in  man  as 
that  true  or  ideal  self  of  himself,  against  which  he 
sins  perpetually,  yet  the  presence  of  which  in  him  is 
what  makes  him  a  being  capable  at  all  of  the  salva- 
tion which  ultimately,  as  the  life  of  devoted  service, 
means  likeness  to  God.  But  if  the  ideal  principle  of 
humanity  is  thus  in  God  eternally ;  if  the  divine  nature 
contains  in  that  sense  the  human ;  then  the  eternal 
Son  of  God,  in  becoming  incarnate  as  man — true  or 
ideal  man,  not  sinful  man — did  not  go  out  from  Deity 
into  some  alien  realm ;  did  not  assume  a  foreign  type 
of  consciousness ;  did  not  add  a  second  and  disparate 
nature  to  His  eternal  nature.  Rather,  He  was  true 
to  Himself ;  true  to  that  which,  since  it  is  eternal  in 
the  Father,  is  to  the  Son  the  principle  of  His  being 
and  the  life  of  His  life. 

Such  a  suggestion,  however,  I  cannot  attempt  in  any 


334    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

way  to  discuss/  The  one  point  I  had  to  urge  with 
regard  to  Christology  may  be  summed  up  thus.  In 
the  first  place,  the  Christian  theist — or,  indeed,  any 
man  whatever  who  believes  in  a  God  who  is  good 
and  is  supreme — has  in  the  ordinary  facts  of  our  ordi- 
nary life  a  difficulty  as  grave  as  any  difficulty  of  the 
oecumenical  theology,  whether  in  its  Trinitarian  or  in 
its  Christological  view.  For  such  a  man  stands  per- 
petually face  to  face  with  the  question  of  the  nature 
of  the  relation  between  God  in  His  goodness  and  per- 
fection, on  the  one  side,  and  on  the  other  side  all  this 
startling  moral  order  and  moral  history  which  is  to  us 
men  our  daily  life  and  the  world  of  our  daily  life. 
We  mistake  if  we  think  that  the  theologian  is  the  only 
man  upon  whom  fall  the  ultimate  and  fundamental 
difficulties  of  the  interpretation  of  life.  Those  diffi- 
culties are  present  in  anything  that  is  human  life  at 
all,  and  the  burden  of  them  rests  upon  every  one  of  us 
when  we  make  any  attempt  whatever  to  understand 
how  the  experience  is  possible  which  is  our  ordinary 
consciousness  and  our  daily  life.  But  more  than  this. 
The  difficulties  which  thus  are  forced  upon  our  thought 
by  our  ordinary  life,  are  mitigated  by  the  acceptance 
of  the  oecumenical  theology.  For  that  theology,  what- 
ever its  technicalities,  has  its  living  nerve  in  the  belief 
that  in  our  actual  history  upon  the  earth,  the  supreme 
power  of  the  world  has  concretely  and  vitally  mani- 
fested itself  as  a  power  of  salvation.    And  as  we  have 

1  See  the  altogether  admirable  discussion  in  the  late  Principle  Caird's 
Fundamental  Ideas  of  Christianity,  vol.   II.,  pp.   100-171. 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  REDEMPTION    335 

seen,  it  is  only  in  the  idea  that  the  order  of  the  world 
is  constituted  by  God  as  an  order  of  salvation,  that  a 
solution  of  the  supreme  difficulty  of  our  life  begins  to 
dawn  upon  us. 

If  the  oecumenical  theology  thus  brings  to  us  the 
idea  in  which  our  ultimate  problem  has  its  solution,  and 
in  which  the  unity  of  our  world  of  experience  comes 
into  view,  it  is  science  in  a  very  deep  meaning  of  that 
great  word ;  and  at  the  same  time  it  is  what  science, 
when  it  reaches  the  ultimate  or  concrete  form  of  its 
principles  of  explanation,  must  necessarily  be — a 
wisdom  of  the  common  and  practical  life.  The 
insight  of  the  oecumenical  theology  is  that  the  God- 
head is  a  society,  a  life  whose  essence  is  mutual 
communion;  and  that  the  possibility  of  an  approach 
of  man  to  that  communion  is  shown  by  the  unity  of 
the  divine  and  the  human  natures  in  Christ.  As  such 
a  view,  this  theology  is  indeed  a  far-reaching  meta- 
physical construction ;  I  will  not  say,  a  daring  venture 
of  thought,  for  everything  in  our  thought  is  a  daring 
venture — we  live  by  continually  making  daring  ven- 
tures which  continually  vindicate  themselves.  But  far- 
reaching  metaphysical  construction  as  it  is,  it  is  no 
abstraction.  It  is  remote  neither  from  the  past  nor 
from  the  present  of  our  life  on  the  earth.  Not  from 
the  life  of  the  past;  it  is  the  interpretation  of  an  actual 
history ;  the  only  interpretation  that  even  begins  to  do 
justice  to  the  facts  of  that  history.  Nor  from  the  life 
of  the  present ;  as  has  just  been  said,  it  makes  reality 
intelligible  to  us;  brings  to  us  the  solution  of  our  last 


336    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

problems;  brings  the  ultimate  and  intelligible  unity 
of  our  strange  and  divided  world  of  experience  into 
view;  and,  as  doing  this,  is  of  first  and  fundamental 
value  as  science.  It  shows  us  how  the  world  of  our 
life — nature  and  history,  history  in  its  struggles,  its 
fearful  antagonisms,  its  slow  growth  of  light  upon  the 
darkness,  nature  apparently  indifferent  to  all  that 
struggle  but  really  forming  one  order  of  being  with 
it — can  be  regarded  as  a  unity;  a  true  and  intelligible 
unity  as  the  progressive  realisation  of  a  divine  pur- 
pose; the  purpose  of  which  Christ  is  supremely  the 
revealer,  and  in  so  deep  a  sense  eternally  the  accom- 
plisher,  that  the  unity  of  history,  as  the  realisation 
of  a  divine  purpose,  is  its  unity  in  Him.  As  such 
science,  the  oecumenical  theology  has  its  deep  harmony 
with  both  of  the  two  great  secular  constructions  of 
science  which  the  modern  mind  willingly  accepts  and 
which  are  directly  determinative  of  it.  The  earlier 
was  the  Greek  attempt  to  apprehend  the  unity  of  the 
actual  manifold  of  experience,  by  conceiving  one  su- 
preme principle  which  articulates  or  unfolds  or  realises 
itself  in  the  laws  and  ways  of  the  world ;  a  supreme 
principle  which  more  and  more  was  exalted  above  the 
world,  until — for  lack  of  some  mediator  between  that 
unutterable  height  and  this  low  world — it  became  the 
altogether  transcendent  God  of  Aristotle,  and  at  last, 
with  the  Neo-Platonists,  a  God  incommunicable.  Of 
that  Greek  thought,  the  oecumenical  theology  is  scien- 
tifically as  well  as  historically  the  culmination ;  it  ful- 
filled the  endeavour  of  Greek  thought,  as  by  itself  that 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  REDEMPTION    337 

thought  never  could  have  done.  The  later  of  the  two 
constructions  is  the  physical  and  natural  science  of 
our  own  day;  the  harmony  of  Christianity,  in  its 
CECumenical  interpretation  of  itself,  with  this  science  in 
what  modern  men  take  to  be  the  most  revolutionary 
of  all  its  insights — its  insight  into  the  unity  of  all  the 
life  of  the  world,  including  the  life  of  man — I  have 
already  tried  to  indicate. 

It  was  this  character  of  the  oecumenical  theology 
as  a  great  scientific  achievement — its  character  as 
science,  and  as  holding  in  science  (since  it  casts  light 
upon  our  ultimate  difficulties)  the  supreme  place — 
that  I  wished  to  insist  upon.  But  one  ought  always 
to  add  that  such  science  is  with  practical  wisdom  one 
same  thing.  A  theology  that  sees  in  the  purpose  of 
a  divine  fatherhood  the  unity  of  the  world's  natural 
and  historical  order,  and  in  Christ  the  revelation,  and 
the  accomplishment  in  principle,  of  that  purpose;  a 
theolog}'  that  thus  builds  its  hope  for  man  upon  a  God 
who  makes  the  whole  order  of  the  world  an  order  of 
salvation;  and  in  such  idea  of  God  and  man,  bears 
within  it  the  inspiration  and  the  perpetual  demand  to 
realise  a  Kingdom  of  Heaven  in  which,  in  the  love  of 
God,  all  men  serve  the  good  of  all,  and  no  man  is  to 
his  fellow  either  a  tyrant  or  a  slave ; — such  a  theology 
is  the  most  practical  of  all  teachings,  alike  for  the  indi- 
vidual life,  and  for  a  race  that  has  to  conduct  its  civili- 
sation through  continual  and  fateful  change. 

It  was  this  that  I  had  in  mind — both  on  its  scien- 
tific and  on  its  practical  side — in  saying  that  in  the 


338    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

long  movement  of  human  thought  and  life  the  oecu- 
menical theology  has  not  exhausted  its  significance, 
nor  been  outlived;  and  that  they  do  well  who  seek 
to  hand  it  on  to  be  the  light  of  whatever  civilisation 
is  to  come.  And  if  it  be  asked  whether  this  ought  not 
to  be  said  rather  of  vital  Christianity  than  of  an  an- 
cient theology  laden  with  Greek  metaphysic,  the  an- 
swer is  that  no  theology  whatever — not  the  deepest, 
not  the  soundest,  not  the  historically  most  influential — 
can  in  any  sense  take  the  place  of  religion;  but  that 
nevertheless  theology,  in  its  own  place,  has  its  own 
value.  Theology  means  the  organising  principles  of 
vital  Christianity  brought  to  that  systematic  intel- 
lectual consciousness  which  is  science  or  philosophy; 
and  the  oecumenical  theology  is  this  task  done  with 
pre-eminent  power,  and  with  a  true  sense  of  what  is 
central  and  vital ;  so  that  it  has  commanded  the  mind 
of  the  church  by  expressing  what  is  deepest  in  it. 
And  if  the  principles  that  are  deepest  in  the  Christian 
mind  are  seen  to  be  the  best  science  or  philosophy  we 
have — are  seen  to  give  us,  better  than  any  other,  a 
view  of  the  world  of  our  experience  as  no  chaos,  but 
an  intelligible  unity — then  to  that  extent  religion  and 
reason  are  with  each  other  made  one. 

The  second  of  the  two  remarks  which  I  wished  to 
be  allowed  to  make  is  this.  It  is  in  the  Incarnation 
and  Passion,  the  life  and  death,  of  our  Lord,  and  in 
that  long  course  of  religious  history  to  which  the 
Incarnation  stands  as  the  vital  and  life-giving  centre — 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  REDEMPTION    339 

it  is  in  this,  we  are  agreed,  that  human  history  reveals 
its  inner  character  as  a  manifestation  of  the  saving 
grace  of  God.  But,  that  being  seen,  we  must  recall 
something  which  puts  upon  us  the  obligation  of  a  great 
catholicity.  The  argument  by  which  we  were  brought 
to  the  belief  that  God  is  present  in  man's  life,  winning 
to  Himself  man's  heart,  leading  man  through  des- 
perate spiritual  conflict  to  communion  with  Him — 
communion  deepened  infinitely  by  the  struggle  through 
which  it  is  realised — was  an  argument  in  which  we 
were  attempting  to  make  clear  to  ourselves  the  order 
in  which  we  have  our  common  life.  The  conditions 
of  our  life  we  found  to  be  such  as  to  issue  in  one  great 
demand  that  the  whole  order  of  the  world,  the  whole 
nature  and  constitution  of  things,  in  which  we  have 
our  life,  should  be  organised  by  the  Creator  as  an 
order  of  salvation.  Hence,  with  whatever  force  that 
argument  leads  us  to  look  in  history  for  a  process 
of  the  salvation  of  man,  with  that  same  force  it  leads 
us  to  regard  the  whole  of  history — nay,  the  whole  of 
nature  and  history — as  in  relation  to  the  process  of 
salvation,  and  as  having  in  that  relation  its  true  or 
ultimate  significance.  From  that  rational  compulsion, 
whether  it  be  weak  or  strong,  one  cannot  imagine  any 
theologian  wishing  to  escape ;  one  cannot  imagine  any 
theologian  wishing  to  argue  that  the  field  and  extent 
of  the  redemptive  agencies  must  be  narrower  than  the 
extent  and  field  of  man's  sin  and  loss.  And  the  very 
loyalty  of  the  Christian  theologian  to  Christ  surely 
leads  him  in  the  same  direction ;  makes  him  intent  upon 


340    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

the  thought  of  the  organic  connexion  of  the  mission 
of  Jesus  with  the  whole  of  man's  Hfe,  with  the  whole 
of  the  historical  and  natural  conditions  of  that  life, 
and  with  every  genuinely  helpful  agency  that  has  had 
a  place  in  the  historical  process  of  man's  salvation. 
Saint  Paul  had  no  doubt  that  in  the  Son  of  God — the 
Son  of  His  love — all  things  were  created ;  that  in  Him 
all  things  hold  together.  After  that  great  example, 
teachers  of  the  church  scarcely  do  well  to  give  way  to 
intellectual  timidities ;  as  though  we  did  God  honour 
by  holding  His  work  within  narrow  bounds.  I  insist  so 
eagerly  upon  this,  just  because  in  any  such  life  as  ours 
upon  the  earth  it  must  remain  rather  a  matter  of  the 
spirit,  a  matter  of  a  man's  point  of  view  and  intellectual 
disposition,  than  of  the  achievement  of  any  great  num- 
ber of  particular  insights.  We  do  well,  I  think,  to  be 
convinced  that  human  history,  in  the  true  inwardness 
of  it,  is  organised  as  a  redemptive  process ;  that  God's 
saving  agencies  are  as  wide  as  His  creation,  and  as 
the  need  of  His  creation ;  that  the  mind  in  which  He 
administers  all  things  is  the  mind  which  He  revealed 
in  Christ,  His  eternal  Word.  But  the  fact  remains 
that  we  cannot  explain  in  detail  how  all  the  various 
factors  in  the  movement  of  history  have  their  places 
in  the  redemptive  work.  And  that  for  the  best  of 
reasons ;  we  do  not — in  our  present  life,  cannot — see 
particular  facts  in  the  total  system  of  their  relations; 
and  so  cannot  read  them  in  their  divine  interpretation. 
Some  things  indeed  we  can  see ;  a  certain  saving  force 
in  social  duties  of  home  or  state;  or  in  nature,  calling 


FREEDOM,  SIN  AND  REDEMPTION    341 

man  upward  by  the  power  of  her  solemn  beauty,  her 
vast  intellectual  design,  her  silent  depth  of  consola- 
tion; nay,  even  in  what  we  call  natural  evils.  Out  of 
hunger  and  cold  and  sickness,  and  the  sundering  of 
loving  hearts  by  death, 

Cold,  pain,  and  labour,  and  all  fleshly  ills ; 
And  mighty  poets  in  their  misery  dead, 

has  proceeded  a  deepening  of  the  powers  and  the  af- 
fections of  men.  Out  of  the  natural  inequalities  of 
human  beings  in  the  social  order,  compassion  has 
arisen — if  any  man  think  it  little,  let  him  turn  his  eyes 
back  upon  primitive  society ;  compassion  and  pity  and 
the  grace  of  forgiveness;  hopes  and  ideals  and  high 
passions  that  are  the  dawning  strength  of  some  more 
righteous  social  order  yet  to  be.  Such  things  we  can 
see;  and  many  more;  and  it  is  good  in  such  things  to 
see  the  light  of  God,  though  it  breaks  upon  us  only 
here  and  there  in  regions  where  we  can  but  grope  in 
the  dark  and  reach  up  blind  hands  of  faith.  But  the 
unsolved  problems  are  innumerable.  If  for  a  moment 
we  think  of  history  rather  as  a  whole  of  fact  than  as 
a  temporal  succession,  what  we  find,  when  we  attempt 
to  view  it  as  in  its  totality  the  manifestation  of  the 
saving  grace  of  God,  is  a  vast  circle,  at  the  centre 
piercing  light,  but  outward  from  that  centre  immense 
regions,  obscure  and  hard  to  read.  Yet  when  we  can- 
not penetrate  to  a  solution,  it  does  not  follow  that 
there  is  none.  We  see  not  "to  the  close."  When  the 
darkness  seems  a  sheer  and  hopeless  darkness — when. 


342    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

for  instance,  we  think  of  individuals  and  races  that 
have  gone  their  way,  after  a  Hfe  sunken  in  the  ugHest 
forms  of  evil,  with  apparently  nothing  in  it  that  in 
any  worthy  sense  could  be  called  a  saving  power — we 
must  say  that  this  is  assuredly  not  the  full  account 
of  the  matter.  Here  upon  the  earth,  assuredly  we  are 
only  at  the  beginning  of  things. 

But  from  the  circumference  with  its  mingling  of 
darkness  and  light,  let  us  turn  back  to  what  for  the 
mind  of  the  theologian,  and  still  more  for  the  religious 
heart,  is  the  centre.  If  the  view  of  the  world  and  of 
history  which  slowly  has  been  brought  to  the  con- 
sciousness of  man,  and  which  it  has  been  our  attempt 
to  retrace  for  ourselves  in  outline — if  that  view  pene- 
trates at  all  to  the  truth  of  things,  then  the  centre  to 
which  now  we  turn  our  faces,  the  centre  of  reality  for 
the  religious  heart,  is  the  centre  of  reality  for  reason 
also.  For  upon  the  view  in  question,  the  most  reason- 
able of  all  things  is  that  in  the  midst  of  man's  years 
upon  the  earth  there  appeared  the  Son  of  God  who, 
being  lifted  up,  draws  all  men  to  Him ;  and  by  draw- 
ing them  to  Him  makes  their  sin  hateful  to  them,  and 
wins  their  hearts  to  that  love  of  God  which  to  those 
who  know  it  is  salvation,  and  hope,  and  eternal  life. 


INDEX 

Apologetics,  51,  171,  239-240. 

Arianism,  27. 

Aristotle,  2%n,  78-80,  110,  147-148,  163,  172-173,  188,  200,  336. 

Augustine,  16,  36m,  163,  273m. 

Bradley,  F.  H.,  103-104,  116,  129,  182,  255. 

Caird,  John,  334n. 

Christ, 

— the  founder  of  the  Christian  consciousness,  6-9.     Cf.  219- 
244. 

— incarnate  and  redemptive,  the  principle  of  the  unity  of  his- 
tory, 37-42,  60-61,  164,  165,  234,  295-308,  308-313,  318,  342. 

—the  eternal  Son  of  God,  318-338. 
Christian  consciousness,  the,  1-69  {see  Table  of  Contents). 
Clarke,  William  Newton,  301«. 
Cleanthes,  141,  152. 
Cudworth,  274». 
Dante,  184,  185. 
Darwin,  173. 

Deism,  12n,  27,  159-161,  278-279.    Cf.  329-330. 
Eternity  and  Time,   120-124,  179,  228,  246,  323-324.     Cf.  note 

to  272. 
Fairbairn,  A.  M.,  268w. 

Faith,  4,  36m;  and  see  Christian  consciousness. 
Fichte,  101. 
Freedom,  59-60,  72,  156-159,   166,   170,   194,  205,  214,  240-241, 

268-272,  299-300,  302-304,  307-308,  318.     Cf.  89-109,  and  109- 

144. 
Green,  T.  H.,  125m,  274«. 
Hegel,  27,  Z7,  87,  101,  104,  188,  213,  233,  300m. 
Hume,  99,  211m,  273m. 
Huxley,  273m. 

Immortality,  33-34,  206-208,  254,  342. 
Incarnation,  see  Christ. 
James,  William,  28,  31,  39. 
Joachim,  105-106. 
Kant,  87,  101,  205,  242,  276«,  317. 


344    CHRISTIAN  VIEW  OF  THE  WORLD 

Locke,  273n. 

Lyman,  30 In. 

Luther,  36n,  163. 

Manichasism,  26,  168. 

McTaggart,  104,  129,  182,  277n. 

Miracle,  219-244. 

Morris,  William,  246. 

Myers,  F.  W.  H.,  25. 

Mysticism,  13n,  82,  161,  196,  259,  329-330. 

Naturalism,  cf.  219-244. 

Nature,  59,   127,   133,   165,   166-253    (see   Table  of  Contents), 

312-313. 
Neo-Platonism,  336. 

Pantheism,  13m,  157,  212,  270,  273n,  298. 
Personality,  12n;  and  see  Freedom. 
Plato,  28m,  80m,  96,  101,  120,  131m,  144-149,  188,  200,  213,  233, 

319. 
Prayer,  244-252. 
Rashdall,  Hastings,  27. 

Realism,  81-88;  cf.  121-124,  180,  223-225,  238,  275m. 
Redemption,  see  Christ;  and  cf.  159,  165,  338-342. 
Royce,  124m,  301m,  328. 

Saint  Paul,  12m,  41,  141,  152,  154,  163,  199,  204,  277,  291,  340. 
San  day,  331-332. 
Scepticism,  260;  cf.  292. 
Seeberg,  140,  174. 
Shelley,  189. 
Sin,  14,  20-37,  60,  72-73,  120,  160,  165,  202-204,  235,  253,  254- 

342  (see  Table  of  Contents). 
Socrates,  108. 
Spinoza,  270,  273m,  298. 
Stoics,  273m;  cf.  141,  152. 
TertulHan,  18. 
Wordsworth,  171,  189,  208,  341. 


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